Blackbird Archive
← v19n1, Spring 2020
Poetry · Volume 19, Number 1

The Black Mountains

Tomas Tranströmer, translation from Swedish by Patty Crane

Around the next curve the bus emerged from the mountain’s cold shadow,

turned its nose into the sun and crawled uphill roaring.

We were crammed on the bus. The dictator’s bust was also there,

wrapped in newspaper. A bottle was passed from mouth to mouth.

Death’s birthmark grew at a different speed in everyone.

High in the mountains, the blue sea caught up with the sky.

politicsmortalitytranslation
Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer, recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, is the author of nineteen collections of poetry in his native country of Sweden and is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading poets. Tranströmer is the recipient of many awards and honors in Sweden and worldwide, including the Swedish Award of the International Poetry Forum, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings and a Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award in 2007. Many of his collections have been translated into English, including The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010), The Great Enigma: Collected Poems (New Directions, 2006), and The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (Graywolf Press, 2001).