Tomas Tranströmer's stroke of genius: language but no words

In 1990, the widely acclaimed Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer lost his speech and the ability to use his right hand as a result of a stroke. As if anticipating his own fate, in 1974, he referred in his longest poem Baltics the story of the Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin who suffered the same symptoms as Tranströmer following a brain bleed: "Then, cerebral hemorrhage: paralysis on the right side with aphasia." An amateur pianist himself, Tranströmer carried on playing left-handed piano pieces after the stroke. In spite of a severe nonfluent dysphasia with dysgraphia, Tranströmer kept producing a poetic language of the highest caliber in accordance with his 1979 no less prophetic verse "language but no words." And through music and poetry, overcame the great communication barriers imposed by a large dominant hemispheric stroke. A nonprolific writer before the stroke, after it Tranströmer became disproportionately brief compared to his prestroke production, confining most of his poetry to the agrammatical and telegraphic haiku style.