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Windows and Stones: Selected Poems
English, Swedish (translation)
84 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1972
99 people want to read
About the author
Tomas Tranströmer
154 books387 followersHis poetry, building on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, contains powerful imagery concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. “He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review.
Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”
His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.
On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".
Critic and poet Tom Sleigh observed, in his Interview with a Ghost (2006), that “Tranströmer’s poems imagine the spaces that the deep then inhabits, like ground water gushing up into a newly dug well.”
His honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum,the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, and especially the 2011 Nobel Prize in literature. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives in Sweden.
On Thursday, 6th of October 2011 he was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 11, 2021
Overhead the stars flash desperately,
switched on and off by racing clouds
which, only when they veil the light, reveal
their presence, like those clouds of the past
that wander through the soul.
switched on and off by racing clouds
which, only when they veil the light, reveal
their presence, like those clouds of the past
that wander through the soul.
September 9, 2019
Struggled to truly get into these. Poems like Summer Plain, An Artist in the North, Allegro, The Palace, and Tracks were quite good, but overall there's nothing special on offer here.
The Great Enigma collection is the better Tranströmer book, but even that took awhile for me to get to grips with. He's a poet that I've now read twice, and I still don't quite know what to make of him.
The Great Enigma collection is the better Tranströmer book, but even that took awhile for me to get to grips with. He's a poet that I've now read twice, and I still don't quite know what to make of him.
November 2, 2015
Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without-and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
Noticing what is about to happen, you shout desperately: "Stop!
Anything, anything, as long as I don’t have to know myself."
When Tomas Tranströmer says the sun blazes, you are sort of taken aback because you actually feel pushed a few steps back by the heavy rays of the sun and when he speaks of a black night, you are cowed by the weight of the dark. There is no in-between in the sensations you derive from his words - it is complete. The unsettling strength of his words and the overpowering imagery contained in it sometimes tugs at the heartstrings, and sometimes, makes your soul drown in sorrow. Like the cold hard stare from the eyes of a wronged God, every single word that Tranströmer has penned in the wonderful collection pierces straight through your heart and is burned into your subconscious. So when I stopped at the final page and thought what exactly was this all about, I wasn’t feeling uplifted with nature’s beauty like I’m with Keats or sunk in eternal hell, like I’m with Poe. No, it was something different. It wasn’t about beauty or sorrow, even though what he says contains abundant amounts of both of these. He reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa in the way he went about clinically destroying everything that dared to come between him and what he meant to express. No, it wasn’t about beauty. It was about the truth. The truth under the paint on the walls, the truth under the skin of every man. For the truth to be revealed, he wasn’t afraid to tear apart the beautiful tapestry that was hiding it.
“Beauty is something snatched briefly from the side.”
The other wonderful thing about Tranströmer’s style is the absolute disregard for anything unnecessary or pretentious, and sometimes, as he goes about in this style of his, it might appear as if he has chopped down maybe a bit more than he should. And herein lies his genius, and the beauty of his work. The lesser he writes, the stronger his words get. I personally enjoyed his poems with minimal words than the ones where there are entire sentences of images. There is some strange beauty in picturing a simple windowpane, with moths clinging to it, as Tranströmer pictures them as little telegrams from the world. It is eerily enjoyable. As I went through the pages and his images, it wasn’t very dissimilar to watching a Wong Kar-Wai movie unfold, with it’s exquisite use of soul-wrenching minimalism to convey the essence of our lives. It isn’t all rainbows and sunshine, but at least there are rainbows and sunshine.
Great book.
one comes from without-and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
Noticing what is about to happen, you shout desperately: "Stop!
Anything, anything, as long as I don’t have to know myself."
When Tomas Tranströmer says the sun blazes, you are sort of taken aback because you actually feel pushed a few steps back by the heavy rays of the sun and when he speaks of a black night, you are cowed by the weight of the dark. There is no in-between in the sensations you derive from his words - it is complete. The unsettling strength of his words and the overpowering imagery contained in it sometimes tugs at the heartstrings, and sometimes, makes your soul drown in sorrow. Like the cold hard stare from the eyes of a wronged God, every single word that Tranströmer has penned in the wonderful collection pierces straight through your heart and is burned into your subconscious. So when I stopped at the final page and thought what exactly was this all about, I wasn’t feeling uplifted with nature’s beauty like I’m with Keats or sunk in eternal hell, like I’m with Poe. No, it was something different. It wasn’t about beauty or sorrow, even though what he says contains abundant amounts of both of these. He reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa in the way he went about clinically destroying everything that dared to come between him and what he meant to express. No, it wasn’t about beauty. It was about the truth. The truth under the paint on the walls, the truth under the skin of every man. For the truth to be revealed, he wasn’t afraid to tear apart the beautiful tapestry that was hiding it.
“Beauty is something snatched briefly from the side.”
The other wonderful thing about Tranströmer’s style is the absolute disregard for anything unnecessary or pretentious, and sometimes, as he goes about in this style of his, it might appear as if he has chopped down maybe a bit more than he should. And herein lies his genius, and the beauty of his work. The lesser he writes, the stronger his words get. I personally enjoyed his poems with minimal words than the ones where there are entire sentences of images. There is some strange beauty in picturing a simple windowpane, with moths clinging to it, as Tranströmer pictures them as little telegrams from the world. It is eerily enjoyable. As I went through the pages and his images, it wasn’t very dissimilar to watching a Wong Kar-Wai movie unfold, with it’s exquisite use of soul-wrenching minimalism to convey the essence of our lives. It isn’t all rainbows and sunshine, but at least there are rainbows and sunshine.
Great book.
June 16, 2012
Windows and Stones: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer is a collection of his poetry from different eras. Reading the translator's preface, I realized how sad I was about not being able to read them in the original Swedish, as the words seem so lyrical. I hate that I am not getting the auditory feel for the poems he intended. I may actually find recordings of him reading some of these so that I can have that, now that I know what the poems actually say.
The poems in this collection are full of powerful imagery. I feel that I have visited Sweden, with its water, blazing sun, deep forests, dark nights. It was a gorgeous trip. Tomas Tranströmer also does a wonderful job of capturing moments of sleeping and waking. I loved this ending from Nocturne (which I loved as a whole):
I lie down ready for sleep, I see the queerest pictures
and signs that scrawl themselves behind my eyelids
on the dark's wall. In a slot between waking and dream
a very large envelope tries in vain to push itself through.
Overall, I was relieved to find this collection working its way from more recent work back to the poet's earlier writing. I think I am not bright enough to follow the recent poems, but starting at about 1962, the poetry began to make more sense, and the transitions between images felt enlightening rather than befuddling. I am glad to have had a chance to experience this Nobelist's work and to have seen Sweden through such perceptive eyes!
The poems in this collection are full of powerful imagery. I feel that I have visited Sweden, with its water, blazing sun, deep forests, dark nights. It was a gorgeous trip. Tomas Tranströmer also does a wonderful job of capturing moments of sleeping and waking. I loved this ending from Nocturne (which I loved as a whole):
I lie down ready for sleep, I see the queerest pictures
and signs that scrawl themselves behind my eyelids
on the dark's wall. In a slot between waking and dream
a very large envelope tries in vain to push itself through.
Overall, I was relieved to find this collection working its way from more recent work back to the poet's earlier writing. I think I am not bright enough to follow the recent poems, but starting at about 1962, the poetry began to make more sense, and the transitions between images felt enlightening rather than befuddling. I am glad to have had a chance to experience this Nobelist's work and to have seen Sweden through such perceptive eyes!
June 29, 2014
Cue to 1:20 below to hear Tranströmer read his poem on Haydn. You don't even need to know Swedish to get a real sense of what a poet this is.
1989 interview with Tomas Tranströmer (YouTube)
1989 interview with Tomas Tranströmer (YouTube)
August 4, 2015
I love the poetry of Transtromer but this is a dreadful translation. I suggest reading The Great Enigma (trans Robin Fulton) or The Half-Finished Heaven (trans Robert Bly).
This poet is far too important to read in anything but the best translations possible.
This poet is far too important to read in anything but the best translations possible.
July 27, 2025
Back to poetry for my sixth Nobel read of 2025, with Thomas Tranströmer’s work. He won the Nobel prize in 2011 "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." Windows and Stones was the only book by Tranströmer that I was able to find at my local library, translated by May Swenson. It looked as it has been untouched for a while and just about fell apart when I opened it.
In the preface, Swenson refers to her work not as translations, but rather as “approximations in English” or “Englishing of the poems.” She calls the process of bridging the gap between language a “clumsy and disfiguring act” and laments that poetry, as opposed to other art forms, must undergo profound alterations to be seen. Those are very fair observation, what becomes of translated poetry, and how does it relate to the original work? Yet to Swenson, one feels a “commonality with (Tranströmer’s) meditations and the discoveries arising from them.”
I read that Tranströmer “was a poet with an uncanny ability to distill the interior life of people and objects, moving toward their core rapidly, while always retaining a sort of spiritual meditation about the process.” He wanted poetry to be a new communication between experiences, giving people to discover in themselves dimension of life they did not know existed. He was certainly strongly influenced by the natural world of his native Sweden.
He was a psychologist by profession, who among other thing spend time working with juvenile criminals. He did not publish a lot, perhaps just over 200 poems. He suffered a stroke in 1990 and had difficulty talking as a result. This book of selected poems is probably not the best choice for apprehending his work, but this is what I have on hand.
One of my favorite poems was probably Palace, with his ominous description of a deserted palace, hushed, vacant, bare… Tranströmer seems to ponder the passing of time, the infinite while keeping darkness at bay, but just… I don’t think it is one of his better-known poems, and I can’t quite fully make sense of it, but it captures my mind. Here is the second part:
Softer than the whisper in a shell / noises and voices from the town / we heard circling in the empty room, / muttering in their search for power. / Also something else. Something dark / stationed itself at the threshold / of our five senses but couldn’t pass. / Silent sand ran in the hourglass. / Time we bestirred ourselves. We moved / toward the horse. He was gigantic, / black as iron. The image of power itself, / still here, though sovereigns have vanished. / The horse spoke: I am the Only One. / The vacancy that rode me I have thrown. / This is my stable. I am growing slowly. / And I eat the silence here.
(There is another translation of this poem I found online but here I much prefer Swenson’s…)
Preludes I think is better known, here Tranströmer talks about emptying his mothers’ apartment after her passing and creates a strong sense of place.
The apartment I’ve lived un most of my life is to be evacuated.
It’s already emptied of everything. An anchor has let go-
but despite the mournful air it’s still the lightest apartment
in the city. Truth needs no furniture. I’ve gone one round
on life’s circle and come back to the starting point:
a bare room. Scenes from my early life take shape on the walls
like Egyptian paintings inside a burial chamber. But they
are fading. The light is too strong. The windows have
enlarged. The empty apartment is a big telescope pointed at
the sky. It’s as quiet here as a Quaker meeting. Nothing, heard
but the pigeons of the backyards, their cooing.
Preludes is the poem I will keep with me as I close this book.
In the preface, Swenson refers to her work not as translations, but rather as “approximations in English” or “Englishing of the poems.” She calls the process of bridging the gap between language a “clumsy and disfiguring act” and laments that poetry, as opposed to other art forms, must undergo profound alterations to be seen. Those are very fair observation, what becomes of translated poetry, and how does it relate to the original work? Yet to Swenson, one feels a “commonality with (Tranströmer’s) meditations and the discoveries arising from them.”
I read that Tranströmer “was a poet with an uncanny ability to distill the interior life of people and objects, moving toward their core rapidly, while always retaining a sort of spiritual meditation about the process.” He wanted poetry to be a new communication between experiences, giving people to discover in themselves dimension of life they did not know existed. He was certainly strongly influenced by the natural world of his native Sweden.
He was a psychologist by profession, who among other thing spend time working with juvenile criminals. He did not publish a lot, perhaps just over 200 poems. He suffered a stroke in 1990 and had difficulty talking as a result. This book of selected poems is probably not the best choice for apprehending his work, but this is what I have on hand.
One of my favorite poems was probably Palace, with his ominous description of a deserted palace, hushed, vacant, bare… Tranströmer seems to ponder the passing of time, the infinite while keeping darkness at bay, but just… I don’t think it is one of his better-known poems, and I can’t quite fully make sense of it, but it captures my mind. Here is the second part:
Softer than the whisper in a shell / noises and voices from the town / we heard circling in the empty room, / muttering in their search for power. / Also something else. Something dark / stationed itself at the threshold / of our five senses but couldn’t pass. / Silent sand ran in the hourglass. / Time we bestirred ourselves. We moved / toward the horse. He was gigantic, / black as iron. The image of power itself, / still here, though sovereigns have vanished. / The horse spoke: I am the Only One. / The vacancy that rode me I have thrown. / This is my stable. I am growing slowly. / And I eat the silence here.
(There is another translation of this poem I found online but here I much prefer Swenson’s…)
Preludes I think is better known, here Tranströmer talks about emptying his mothers’ apartment after her passing and creates a strong sense of place.
The apartment I’ve lived un most of my life is to be evacuated.
It’s already emptied of everything. An anchor has let go-
but despite the mournful air it’s still the lightest apartment
in the city. Truth needs no furniture. I’ve gone one round
on life’s circle and come back to the starting point:
a bare room. Scenes from my early life take shape on the walls
like Egyptian paintings inside a burial chamber. But they
are fading. The light is too strong. The windows have
enlarged. The empty apartment is a big telescope pointed at
the sky. It’s as quiet here as a Quaker meeting. Nothing, heard
but the pigeons of the backyards, their cooing.
Preludes is the poem I will keep with me as I close this book.
March 6, 2012
I finished this at a difficult time, and mentally it has vanished a little. When I started it I really had the feeling that I was reading translations. Something seemed lacking. As I progressed maybe I just got more used to his style. He grew on me and I will be checking out more of his work. Maybe it was the translator, maybe it was me. I liked him enough by the end though to go back to him. Also, I picked him up because he won the Nobel this past year for poetry. If that means anything to ya.
December 12, 2011
A lovely selection of poems, particularly since it is translated by May Swenson. The language is beautiful and dreamlike. The poems are brief, a movement from the darkness of a tunnel into the light.
August 6, 2012
"Beauty is something snatch briefly from the side."
November 8, 2012
I previously read a collection of his poetry and prose and liked that better than this selection of poems.
Want to read
February 13, 2014jk
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews