ISSN 1758-6488
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Interview with Don Coles Interview |
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EJ: Before we end, what are your impressions of Tranströmer winning the Nobel Prize?
DC: Part of the problem (I’ve been reading more negative comments on his Nobel than the other sort, mostly about aged Swedish jurors and how the reporter had never heard of TT and seemed pleased to say so) is that TT doesn’t translate easily. His use of Swedish is exceptionally calm and understated and, in this quiet which is its own creation, immensely persuasive. I have, as you know but the critics I’ve read do not (know), published a book of my translations of a very late collection called ‘For the Living and the Dead’, a bilingual edition published by Buschekbooks in Ottawa (it won a prize for the best translation of its year in Canada, the first time that a non-French/English book had won), and I did this translation because I had been singularly moved by Tomas’s poems for decades. I don’t think there’s been a worthier Nobelist for a long while.
