Robin Fulton

Redan på femtiotalet skrev Tomas Tranströmer haikudikter, och i sitt senare författarskap har han flera gånger återkommit till den diktformen. Hans haikudikter har tilltalat läsare världen över, inte minst i haikuns hemland Japan. Tranströmers överraskande bildspråk, som snarare tillhör den moderna poesin än den traditionella haikun, har fått många att se honom som en förnyare av den strikta japanska diktformen. I den här trespråkiga utgåvan – på svenska, engelska och kinesiska – har översättarna Robin Fulton och Göran Malmqvist samlat femtiofem av Tranströmers haikudikter, av vilka några här publiceras för första gången.

In the 1960s and 1970s Robin Fulton Macpherson was active in Scottish literary life as a poet, reviewer and essayist, for many years editing Lines Review. His home base since 1973 has been Norway, and in the decades since then he has built a solid reputation as a translator of Scandinavian poets, such as Tomas Transtr mer, Kjell Espmark and Harry Martinson from Swedish, and Olav H. Hauge from Norwegian. James McGonigal has described his earlier poems as "detached, meditative, lyrical and melancholy, often with a sense of deep psychological disturbance just beyond the edge of his local landscapes." In his later poems, other commentators have noted a dry wit, a capacity for praise, and a quiet voice that says more than it seems to. Among the older generation, Edwin Morgan and Robert Garioch praised his work, as did Norman MacCaig ("what interests me most is his refusal to be content with simple statements") and Iain Crichton Smith ("a mind of great inventiveness"). As McGonigal points out, while "he may have felt side-lined by poetic fashion, the more astute of the younger generation of Scottish poets have not failed to register his presence."

Robin Fultons Poesie fängt das Dahinfließen der Zeit ein und unsere Stellung in der Natur und zu einander. Präzise, liebevoll und verankert im kleinen Detail werfen diese Gedichte beinahe unmerklich die Fragen auf, die den Menschen seit jeher beschäftigen. Durch ihre Ruhe und Konzentration wirken sie wie Meditationen über die Vergänglichkeit und Schönheit unserer Welten.Zweisprachige Ausgabe: Englisch/DeutschBilingual edition: English/German

Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015) was Sweden’s most important poet of the past fifty years. This book contains all the poems he published, including those from the Bloodaxe Collected Poems of 1987, as well as three later collections, For Living and Dead (1989), The Sad Gondola (1996) and The Great Enigma (2004), and a prose memoir. A further revised edition was published in 2011. In Sweden he has been called a 'buzzard poet' because his haunting, visionary poetry shows the world from a height, in a mystic dimension, but brings every detail of the natural world into sharp focus. His poems are often explorations of the borderland between sleep and waking, between the conscious and unconscious states. Tranströomer was born in Stockholm, where he grew up, but spent many long summers on the island of Runmarö in the nearby archipelago, evoking that landscape in his early work, which draws on the aesthetic tradition of Swedish nature poetry. His later poetry is more personal, open and relaxed, often reflecting his broad interests: travel, music, painting, archaeology and natural sciences. Many of his poems use compressed description and concentrate on a single distinct image as a catalyst for psychological insight and metaphysical interpretation. This acts as a meeting-point or threshold between conflicting elements or forces: sea and land, man and nature, freedom and control. Robin Fulton worked with Tomas Tranströmer on each of his collections as they were published over many years, which involved detailed exchanges between translator and poet on the meaning and music of numerous poems. There have been several translations as well as some books of so-called "versions" of Transtromer's poetry published in English, but Fulton's is the most authoritative and comprehensive edition of his poetry published anywhere.