Another Great Poet

Tomas Transtromer, the great Swedish poet, has just been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Academy cited his "condensed, translucent images" as giving us "fresh access to reality."

Sounds about right.

Here's a seasonally appropriate poem from Transtromer's 1958 collection, Secrets on the Way, and translated by Robin Fulton in 1987's Selected Poems (edited by Robert Hass):

Weather Picture

The October Sea glistens coldly

with its dorsal fin of mirages.

Nothing is left that remembers

the white dizziness of yacht races.

An amber glow over the village.

And all the sounds in slow flight.

A dog's barking is a hieroglyph

painted in the air above the garden

where the yellow fruit outwits

the tree and drops of its own accord.