The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Transtrer - Hardcover

by Tomas Transtrer (Author), Patty Crane (Translator), Yusef Komunyakaa (Introduction by)

Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Transtrer explores the personal and political, the ecological and existential, through poems that expand like the widening scope of a telephoto lens.

With slow strokes and subtle, rich lines, The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Transtrer is evidence of a Nobel Prize-winning poet tracing the world with his pen. A stunning testament to an illustrious career, The Blue House gathers poems and writings from Transtrer's fourteen collections into a single book. Original Swedish sits alongside their English translations as Patty Crane translates his words into revelatory language acute in the understanding of human change and loss.

Subtle in politics and exact in imagery, the poems of The Blue House range from agile haiku to cinematic prose. Social phenomena are observed in rich detail--a "dictator's bust" presiding over a train car of doomed passengers--and the collection is propelled by empathy and curiosity. Under Transtrer's watchful eye, no subject is overlooked: Milij Balakirev, the Russian composer; Nils Dacke, the Swedish peasant who led a rebellion against the king; and him, the stranger who forgets his name by the roadside. From the personal to the political to the existential, Transtrer's poems act as a telephoto lens, granting us reinvigorated access to the world we live in.

Author Biography

About the Author

Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtrer was born in Stockholm in 1931, and studied literature and psychology at the University of Stockholm. A poet and psychologist who worked with disadvantaged youth, Transtrer authored numerous full length poetry collections translated into more than fifty languages. He died in Stockholm in 2015.About the Translator
Patty Crane is a translator and poet from Cape Cod. Her translations of Tomas Transtrer have appeared in The New York Times, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her first book-length Transtrer translation, Bright Scythe, was published by Sarabande Books (2015). Crane spent three years living in Sweden to work with Transtrer and his wife, Monica, to translate and study his work, and, in 2019 received a MacDowell fellowship to continue translating Transtrer's poetry. She currently splits her time between Massachusetts and Vermont.