After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
-- From "Allegro," translated by Robert Bly, in "The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer"
2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view.
-- From "Track," translated by Bly
A 2001 book of poems by Nobel Literature Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, selected and translated by Minnesota poet Robert Bly and published by Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press, will get a reprint of 10,000 copies to meet immediate demand, Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae said Thursday. A second reprint will follow. Bly, a longtime friend as well as one of Tranströmer's first translators, chose what he viewed as the best of Tranströmer's poems to fill "The Half-Finished Heaven."
CLAUDE PECK
It’s too soon to tell how much the immigration crackdown is to blame.
