The Blue House is a stunning testament to an illustrious career as it gathers poems and writings from Tomas Tranströmer’s fourteen collections into a single book. Original Swedish sits alongside their English translations as Patty Crane translates his words into revelatory language acute in the understanding of human change and loss.
Patty has said about translating Tranströmer’s work while living in Sweden:
In my Afterword to Bright Scythe, when describing the depths of my immersion in Tranströmer’s work once I could read it in the original Swedish, I say: “Maybe it was the loneliness and strange reconfiguration of identity that came from living in an unfamiliar place, but I felt I was discovering a third language, at the intersection of the English and Swedish, that helped me locate myself in the context of my foreignness.” Too much time and distance have since passed, but I do remember feeling like I’d entered some new and impossible-to-articulate terrain.
We are thrilled to be spending an afternoon with Patty, who will read from The Blue House as well as speak about translation and how translation of work into other languages creates a connection between people across linguistic and cultural borders and understand there are universal human experiences that defy borders and language.
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