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The Sorrow Gondola

Tomas Tranströmer

Translated from the Swedish by Michael McGriff & Mikaela Grassl

A Bilingual Edition

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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) was one of the most celebrated and influential poets of his generation. He began his career as a psychologist, working for several decades in the field. In 1954, he published his first book, 17 Poems. In 1996, he published The Sorrow Gondola, marking his triumphant return to poetry after a debilitating stroke he suffered in 1990. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.

His other awards included 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.

Translators Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Cofounder of Tavern Books, McGriff is the author of Dismantling the Hills, To Build My Shadow a Fire, and 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.