Baltics

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Swedish by Samuel Charters. In 1974 Tomas Transtr繹mer (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature) published his groundbreaking collection BALTICS (�stersj繹ar). In this book-length poem, Transtr繹mer 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��hese 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 Transtr繹mer's career as a poet. In 1975 Samuel Charters published the seminal translation of Baltics with Oyez. Out of print for nearly 40 years, this new edition contains a revised translation, a new afterword and translator's note, and a series of photographs taken by Ann Charters. This definitive, bilingual edition of BALTICS is sure to delight longtime Transtr繹mer fans and new readers alike.