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Tag: Tomas Transtromer

Friday, 11/4/11

only rock ’n roll

Animal Collective, Unitled/“Brothersport”
Live, Chicago (Pitchfork Festival), 7/15/11

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Want to hear the entire set?

Jazz, classical, gospel, rock: the names may be different, but what they offer is the same—a way, pleasurably, to lose your mind.

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lagniappe

In the evening darkness at a place outside New York, an outlook where/you can perceive eight million people’s homes in a single glance. . . ./Schubert’s being played in some room/there and for someone the tones at this moment are more real than everything else.

—Tomas Transtromer, “Schubertiana” (excerpt), trans. Samuel Charters

Here, in an undated audio clip, Transtromer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks about this poem and reads it in this English translation.

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Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine, which robbed him of speech and impaired the use of his right arm. Rather than delivering the customary [Nobel] laureate’s address when he accepts the award, on December 10th, he will play a piece on the piano using only his left hand.

—Dan Chiasson, “Night Thoughts: The poetry of Tomas Transtromer,” New Yorker, 10/31/11

Thursday, 10/20/11

Joseph Haydn, Piano Sonata No. 24 in D major, excerpt (2nd Movement)
Sviatoslav Richter, live

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.

—Sviatoslav Richter

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reading table

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 taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

—Tomas Transtromer (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature), “Allegro,” trans. from the Swedish by Robert Bly

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More Richter? Here. And here.