“It was brought from the dead woman’s apartment. It stood empty a few days, empty until I filled it with books, all the bound ones, those bulky tomes. With that act I had let in the underworld. Something swelled up from below, mounted slowly, inexorably, like mercury in a gigantic thermometer. You were not allowed to turn your head away.”
~ Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday, from his prose poem “The Bookcase” (translated by May Swenson):
