MUSIKEN I TOMAS TRANSTRÖMERS DIKTNING - EN STUDIE I VERBAL MUSIK

Abstract

The poetry of the Nobel Prize Laureate Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) is well known for its richness of musical references and components. The poet himself was a high level amateur pianist, and he was even promoted an honorable membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Until this thesis was written, the poetry of Tranströmer’s has not been in focus of any musicological studies as far as I know. This thesis proposes a categorisation of the different functions of music in Tranströmer’s poems. A total of 63 poems out of 235 have been identified with some kind of musical content, that is about 27 percent of the complete catalogue of Tranströmer’s poems. Most poems that were identified with a musical content could be connected to more than one of the musical categories. In order to understand how Tranströmer uses music in his poetry, theories by literary scholars Steven Paul Scher (his theory on verbal music) and Werner Wolf (his three forms for ”musicalisation” of literature) have been applied. With this thesis, my aim is to add a musicological perspective to a research field which (surprisingly) is dominated by literary studies. Musicological studies would definitely broaden and deepen the understandning of the meaning of music in literature.