This is poetry to prize, from a Nobel winner

The Deleted World

Poems

By Tomas Tranströmer

Versions by Robin Robertson

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 64 pp. $13 paperback.

Reviewed by John Timpane

Why wouldn't you buy this book?

Thirteen bucks. Exactly 15 poems on 37 pages, plus a short introduction. Less than a dollar a poem, people, to be introduced to the latest Nobel Prize in Literature!? Most of the poems are 20, maybe 30 words long. I realize poems scare the lightning out of people, but really, can we be serious? Be a grown-up. Take ownership.

Go to the bookstore. Or buy The Deleted World - the American debut of a 2006 United Kingdom release - online if you must. Put it in your home where you can read it from time to time. Do it now, while it's winter, because it's winter in many of these poems. Read. And then you will find out why the poet Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden won last year's literary Nobel.

"Never heard of the guy. Have you?" I heard that a few times when the Nobel announcement came. Well, sue me: Like a lot of folks, I've been reading his spare, stark, packed, lucid work since the 1980s. Whenever his name appeared above a stack of lines, I read it on the spot.

Robin Robertson, a poet from Scotland, has given us this little book of translations, with help from his partner, Karin Altenberg, who's helpfully from Sweden. To clear away all the garbage about translating poetry, Robertson rightly calls these "versions," not exact renderings, but free attempts to capture as much of the poem as can be.

Here's a stanza in Swedish, from the superb "Autumnal Archipelago":

Nordlig sturm. Det är i den tid när ronnbars-

klasar mognar. Vaken i mörkret hör man

stjärnbilderna stampa i sina spiltor

hogt över trädet.

With my sad trifle of German, and a Swedish dictionary, I get something like

Northerly storm. This is the time when rowanberry-clusters ripen.

Awake at night, one hears

Constellations stamping in their stalls

High over the tree.

Pretty sweet. The roots of stjärnbilderna mean literally "stars-pictures." No way to get at that in a translation. Hör man is a little tricky, because in English it's the oddly flat "one hears," or the awkward passive "is heard." Robinson gives us

A storm from the north. It is the time of rowanberries.

Awake in the night he hears - far above the horned tree -

the stars, stamping in their stalls.