Baltics

Winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

Tomas Tranströmer published his groundbreaking collection Baltics (östersjöar) 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 by Samuel Charters, a new afterword and translator's note, a series of photographs by Ann Charters, and the original Swedish text en face.