The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (托马斯•特朗斯特罗默 in Chinese) was announced this week as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He’s been nominated every year since 1993, and this is what it sounded like in the Swedish press corps when the announcement was made.
As the Swedish radio channel went through the usual summary of reactions around the world, an unexpected one popped up – congratulations from the Tranströmer Cafe in Kunming, China (which is a part of a Scandinavian-Chinese cross-cultural arts centre called the TCG Nordica). We visited it when we were in Kunming last year – there was an exhibition opening in the gallery space, and it’s always nice to be able to find a cafe in China with authentic Swedish coffee and kanelbullar – but didn’t realise how foresightful the Swedish and Chinese co-owners had been in naming the cafe. In an interview with Tranströmer’s Chinese translator, Li Li, he talks (in Swedish) about why Tranströmer is popular in China, which he ascribes partly to similarities between Tranströmer’s style with the sparse style of traditional Chinese poetry – he calls Tranströmer a modern Tang dynasty poet (full article, again in Swedish, here).