In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote (in Michael Hulse's translation) that "memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life". These poems are records of those memories, suddenly awoken, then blinding and illuminating. Sebald was a chronicler of the forsaken heartlands of memory. In those forbidding regions remains "no sign/of the reclaimed land". In German, that land is the "gewonnenes Land", the land won back, the land wrested away from oblivion, the land we recover when we look, as Sebald did, at the wreckage of what once we held most dear.

For once, last year, the "Immortals" of the Swedish Academy got it right. (They got it right in 2010 too by giving the Nobel Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa — are the Swedes coming to their senses at last?) Last October, finally aware that a great poet was living not a stone's throw from their august precincts, they bestowed the Nobel Prize on Tomas Tranströmer. To be fair, for all his worldwide acclaim, Tranströmer is not an obvious choice. His poems are studiously understated; they are perilously quiet.  Their imagery is weird, their accents gloomy. Indeed, there is something distinctly creepy about them; they can make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. In The Deleted World (Enitharmon Press, £35), the acclaimed Scottish poet Robin Robertson offers "versions" of Tranströmer's poetry. Robertson's versions — what he terms "these imitations", with obvious allusion to Robert Lowell's Imitations — not only read well; they are compelling poems in English. They are superb exemplars of that old shibboleth that a translation should read as though it were a poem "written in English".  

Certainly Robertson takes liberties. He ignores the original forms. Even a reader without Swedish, like myself, can see that the first poem in his selection is written in Sapphics in the original — a metre which Robin Fulton, Tranströmer's long-standing, and brilliant, translator, adopts in his classic versions. Here is how Robertson renders the last stanza of "Autumn Archipelago":

Under the buzzard's circling point of stillness
the ocean rolls thundering into the light; blindly chewing
its straps of seaweed, it snorts up foam across the beach.
The earth is covered in darkness, traced by bats.
The buzzard stops and becomes a star.  The ocean rolls
thundering on, blowing the foam across the beach.