Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer - Hardcover

Bly, Robert; Transtromer, Tomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555976395 ISBN 13: 9781555976392

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2013

Synopsis

The illuminating letters of the National Book Award winning poet Robert Bly and the Nobel Prize winning poet Tomas Tranströmer

One day in spring 1964, the young American poet Robert Bly left his rural farmhouse and drove 150 miles to the University of Minnesota library in Minneapolis to obtain the latest book by the young Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. When Bly returned home that evening with a copy of Tranströmer's The Half-Finished Heaven, he found a letter waiting for him from its author.

With this remarkable coincidence as its beginning, what followed was a vibrant correspondence between two poets who would become essential contributors to global literature. Airmail collects more than 290 letters, written from 1964 until 1990, when Tranströmer suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralyzed and diminished his capacity to write.

Across their correspondence, the two poets are profoundly engaged with each other and with the larger world: the Vietnam War, European and American elections, and the struggles of affording a life as a writer. Airmail also illuminates the work of translation as Bly began to render Tranströmer's poetry into English and Tranströmer began to translate Bly's poetry into Swedish. Their collaboration quickly turned into a friendship that has lasted fifty years.

Insightful, brilliant, and often funny, Airmail provides a rare portrait of two artists who have become integral to each other's particular genius. This publication marks the first time letters by Bly and Tranströmer have been made available in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Bly received the 1968 National Book Award in poetry. Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. They have been friends for fifty years. Graywolf Press published The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, selected and translated by Robert Bly.

From Booklist

The 2001 edition of the 1964–90 correspondence between 2010 Nobel Laureate Tranströmer and Bly, his premier American translator, was a Swedish best-seller. The U.S. edition won’t be similarly successful, but there’s so much new material in it, and so much more appears in its original language—after the first several exchanges, Tranströmer wrote, very well, in English—that it’s a quite different book. The poets struck it off immediately. Through the 1970s, they exchanged poems, polished their translations of one another’s work, as well as Bly’s translations of other Swedes, and helped one another arrange reading and speaking tours, all while sharing family stories, professional gossip, and political opinions (both hated the Vietnam War and dreaded the rise of Reagan). They are fully present to one another in the letters, making them lusciously readable. They also met in person whenever they could, becoming even faster friends. For readers of translation, however, the deep interest of the correspondence lies in its disclosures about rendering one contemporary language into another as realistically as possible. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1555976395
• ISBN 13: 9781555976392
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 476