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

The Boat — The Village

Tomas Tranströmer, translation from Swedish by Patty Crane

A Portuguese fishing boat, blue, its wake rolling up the Atlantic a bit.

A blue point far out, and yet I’m there—the six onboard don’t notice we are seven.

I saw a boat like this being built, laying like a huge lute without strings

in the barren ravine: the village where they wash and wash in rage, patience, melancholy.

Dark with people on the beach. A meeting was breaking up, the loudspeakers were carried off.

Soldiers led the orator’s Mercedes through the crowd, words beating against the metal sides.

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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).