Baltics

Baltics is a long poem by the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer, published in its own volume in 1974 by Albert Bonniers Förlag. It is set in the Stockholm archipelago and begins from notes left by the poet's grandfather, who had worked as a maritime pilot.

The poem moves in a cycle: it opens with the 1884 logbook of his maternal grandfather, Carl Helmer Westerberg, and closes with a photograph of his orphaned maternal grandmother, Maria Westerberg. Between these two points come other scenes, memories and encounters.

For the poet, the keyword of the work is the boundary: between present and past, between east and west, between living and dead, and between silence and what can be articulated. The plural of the title suggests not one Baltic but a series of them, each shaped by the different experiences of those for whom that sea has mattered.

Robin Fulton's English translation appeared in the Scottish magazine Lines Review in 1974 and later as a separate volume in 1980; Samuel Charters's American version followed in 1975. In 1990, a few months before a stroke affected his speech, Tranströmer recorded a Swedish reading of the poem, lasting about twenty-four minutes.