We're particularly excited to be bringing you this long-overdue reprint of Samuel Charters' translation of Tomas Tranströmer's Baltics, a classic of Swedish literature and a masterpiece by any standard.Tomas Tranströmer published this groundbreaking collection in 1974. In this book-length poem, Tranströmer creates a literal and figurative landscape where his family history becomes the psychological, perhaps even the spiritual, history of the poet himself. Time, geography, a family, an island, a country, the labor of seamanship - these elements, and so many more, show a voice whose multiplicities and conjunctions intertwine to resemble something like the layers of a symphony, a symphony of narrative, of the minimal, the liminal, the image, collisions, and fragments.
Baltics, as its plural name suggests, is an experiment in the conflation of time, a theme that has come to define Tranströmer's career as a poet. Out of print for nearly 40 years, this new edition contains a revised translation, a new afterword and translator's note, a series of photographs by Ann Charters, and the original Swedish text en face.
Of this new and expanded edition of Balitcs, Michael Burkard comments:
"It is especially moving to me now, with Tomas Tranströmer having just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, to have the generous and far-reaching Baltics available again, and in such a keen translation. Tomas Tranströmer leaves an indelible mark upon readers everywhere. The gifts of his poems are offered generously and without conditions. I cannot think of another poet who has left more lasting impressions - impressions which never cease, but instead keep creating new spheres of realities and imaginations. He is constantly a poet of nearness. We need Tomas Tranströmer's poetry as much, if not more, in this 21st century as we needed it in the last."
We hope to have this book printed by early January. Click here to make a pre-order. Cheers!
