Published in 1978, Schubertiana, a poem from Tomas Tranströmer’s eighth volume of poems, Sanningsbarriären (Truth Barriers), explores the ways in which music functions as an antidote to the fragmentation that often defines contemporary life.

As typically happens in Tranströmer’s work, the poem’s five sections treat a wide range of disparate images but cohere by touching at least briefly on a central theme—in this case, the music of Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The poem describes a modern world in which people are isolated and fragmented, appearing either as disembodied hands or as bodies made anonymous by urban sprawl. In their isolation they encounter threats to their physical and emotional well-being, ranging from car accidents to duplicitous individuals to anonymous murderers.

Tranströmer suggests that, like the signal that enables the migrating swallow to home in on a specific location across thousands of miles, the music of Schubert provides an almost intuitive means of orienting oneself in an alien and alienating environment. For Tranströmer, aesthetic experience in general and music in particular is a liberating force because its evocative power calls people out of the mental space in which they feel they must defend themselves against external threats and leads them into a space in which they may connect to and experience a communion with something outside of themselves.

The poem concludes with an extended image that captures all of these forces: two people sit at a piano playing Schubert together, and while the mechanics of their playing may be awkward, through their playing they achieve a state in which “happiness and suffering weigh just the same.”

Furthermore, Tranströmer notes that while the two feel that the music acts as a kind of mirror for them—a source of confirmation sorely lacking in the world he describes—such is not the case for those associated with the divisiveness he outlines elsewhere in the poem. These people, who “believe that everybody can be bought,” fail to draw sustenance from Schubert: “they don’t recognize themselves here,” he writes, because “it’s not their music.”

Bibliography
Tranströmer, Tomas. “Schubertiana.” Translated by Samuel Charters, in Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems 1954–1986, edited by Robert Hass. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1987, 143–144.

Categories: Literature, Swedish Literature, World Literature

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