I Found An Audio Recording Of Tranströmer's "Golden Wasp"

It Speaks To All We Are Enduring

“This is more a poem about how a good religious impulse can become perverted.”

This morning, in search of the Tranströmer poem with a line I always liked about the Fanatic and the Doubter, I came upon a treasure. I had forgotten which poem it was. (It was “Golden Wasp.”) The search yielded some kind of audio clip. I heard a deep voice I did not recognize, and then I startled—wait, what?

It’s him, it’s Tranströmer.

I think of him as always having been mute, though I am well aware he was struck mute only after his first stroke in 1990.

I saw that the recording was from 1988. Yes—it made sense. Pre-stroke Tranströmer. They had tape recorders in the late 80s.

What a wonder the internet can be.

I stopped whatever I was doing, sat stock still, listened, and felt certain shadows and depletions leave my body, changed for a different currency.

Poetry is an escape from dead currencies, ideas that can only ever line up, add up, make sense, and be that dead sterile thing we call “correct.”

I insist on talking about poetry because it represents freedom of thought, not speech.

So much emphasis on “truth”and none on the alchemy of words. In the end, only the most aggressive fact hammerers get their say.

I hope you take a few moments to listen to this poem.

Recording of Tomas Tranströmer reading “Golden Wasp” in 1988, here.

For context, T.T. was a bug collector and amateur zoologist before he was a poet and a psychologist.

My essay about Tranströmer, An Artist In The North, in Lapham’s Quarterly, 2015. (Has humor.)

Meeting Tranströmer on Runmarö 2000, with Urban and Erik.

Getting a chance to tell Tomas that Robin Fulton’s translations into English are the best to my ear. He could say about 3 words and his wife Monica conveyed what she felt he wanted to say. It was a very amazing day. 12 Years before the catastrophe, when Urban decided he knew about “HIV” and put me on trial. At my own birthday dinner! Paradise Lost—2012.