Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize in literature.
From “After a Death”:
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
I was reading about this in the New York Times and just getting so sad at what is lost in these poems by them being translated to English. I really liked them but you can feel that some meaning of the words or their order has slipped through the cracks; I feel like nothing that is translated ever has it’s full affect, which is heartbreaking.
(via jesuisperdu)
