The Nobel Prize for Pain : POETRY : FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: New Poems and a Memoir,<i> By Tomas Transtromer</i> ,<i> translated by Joanna Bankier, Samuel Charters, Robin Fulton, Malena Morling and Robert Bly (Ecco: $22; 71 pp.)</i>

Tomas Transtromer has long deserved the Nobel Prize in literature. His bibliography, published in 1990, shows that his work has been translated into at least 33 languages. But he is Swedish and the Swedes, highly self-critical, have not bestowed the prize upon one of their own since 1974 (when it went to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson).

It is time they did. In March a new book of Transtromer’s poems, “Sorgegondolen” (“The Grief Gondola”), came out in Sweden. His last book of poems, “For Levande och Doda” (“For the Living and the Dead”), was published in 1989. In November 1990, Transtromer suffered a massive stroke. In the years since then he augmented the short prose pieces he had been writing and gathered them into the memoir “Minnena ser Mig,” 1993 (“Memories Look at Me”), whose language is not so different from that of his poems--less telegraphed and compressed but just as sharp and clear and humorous. Transtromer has not completely recovered the power of speaking but his writing is as powerful as ever.

“The Grief Gondola” opens with “April and Silence,” a poem that finds the poet taking a walk in the cruelest month. There is not even reflective water in the “dark velvet ditch” he passes. In Malena Morling’s translation the poet writes: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.” The fact that the poet who can hardly speak describes himself as a musical instrument in a black case and chooses to open his new book in this way is poignant and significant.

Because Transtromer’s slim books often comprise poems in varying forms--with long and short lines, in classical meters, free verse or prose--it is hard not to notice that only the title poem has long lines. (It was written before his stroke.) In no other book has Transtromer written in a form as brief as the haiku.

The Ecco Press’ “For the Living and the Dead: New Poems and a Memoir” confusingly bears the title of Transtromer’s 1989 collection. It contains the 17 poems from that book, though not in the original’s order, as well as all but the last section of the memoir. The “new poems” include almost all those in “The Grief Gondola” evidently, however, since the English translation was published, some of the Swedish texts have been revised, with enjambments changed and stanzas added. Perhaps “Midwinter” was written since the English version went to press. But it’s hard to understand why three more haiku were excluded from the “Eight Haiku” printed here; they came out in BLM, a well-known Swedish literary journal, in August 1994 and from the fourth section of the series “Haiku” in “The Grief Gondola.” It is harder, still, to comprehend the omission of the last section of the memoir. Precisely there we learn how and when Transtromer started to write and publish his poems.

The translations have been respectably done by many hands, writing with varying degrees of Anglican or American idiom and metrical or rhythmic competence. “For the Living and the Dead” serves as an important update for the poet’s English readers, but it suffers from no one person’s taking responsibility for consistent tone and idiom.

However, Transtromer’s diction is so simple and open that it is always possible to argue about choices. A truly interesting volume of Transtromer in translation would print any number of poems, each in half a dozen versions. In the end, I wish this book were a software program. The present version 1.0 needs debugging. The publisher should provide all purchasers with version 1.1., an upgrade.