750 S. Spaulding Ave., Suite 112
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

The Sorrow Gondola

Tomas Tranströmer

Translated from the Swedish by Michael McGriff & Mikaela Grassl

A Bilingual Edition

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Nobel Prize-winner Tomas Tranströmer is one of the most celebrated and influential poetic figures of his generation. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and educated at Sodra Latin School and the University of Stockholm, where he received a degree in psychology. He began his psychology career in the early 1960s at Roxtuna, a juvenile corrections institute in Sweden, and worked for several decades in the field.

Since the publication of 17 Dikter (17 Poems) in 1954, Tranströmer has written eleven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Den stora gatan (The Vast Enigma) in 2004. He is one of the world's most translated poets (with books appearing in numerous editions in over fifty languages). Other honors which he has received include the Petrarch Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bellman Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the August Prize, the International Poetry Forum's Swedish Award, the Oevralids Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize.

The Sorrow Gondola is the first collection of poetry Tranströmer completed after the debilitating stroke he suffered in 1990. Since its publication, it has sold over 30,000 copies in Sweden alone. This new bilingual edition offers North American readers Tranströmer's seminal work for the first time as a single volume.

Translators Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Co-founder of Tavern Books, McGriff is the author of Dismantling the Hills, To Build My Shadow a Fire, and a forthcoming volume of poetry, The Sequence of the Night. A native of Sunne, Sweden, Grassl is a graduate of the Torsby Ski Academy (Sweden) and the University of Utah, where she was a three-time All-American alpine ski racer.