Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Transtromer
The 2001 edition of the 1964–90 correspondence between 2010 Nobel Laureate Tranströmer and Bly, his premier American translator, was a Swedish best-seller. The U.S. edition won’t be similarly successful, but there’s so much new material in it, and so much more appears in its original language—after the first several exchanges, Tranströmer wrote, very well, in English—that it’s a quite different book. The poets struck it off immediately. Through the 1970s, they exchanged poems, polished their translations of one another’s work, as well as Bly’s translations of other Swedes, and helped one another arrange reading and speaking tours, all while sharing family stories, professional gossip, and political opinions (both hated the Vietnam War and dreaded the rise of Reagan). They are fully present to one another in the letters, making them lusciously readable. They also met in person whenever they could, becoming even faster friends. For readers of translation, however, the deep interest of the correspondence lies in its disclosures about rendering one contemporary language into another as realistically as possible. --Ray Olson