Nobel Shmobel

Every year that Philip Roth is passed over for the Nobel Prize in Literature is a year that blessings are blocked. That said, this year's "winner" is a Swedish poet whose work, like everyone outside of Sweden, I had never read.

The New Yorker always knows when to zero in on their slush pile. Here is a poem by Tomas Transtromer, who has an umlaut somewhere in there. It's called The House of Headache. And, I guess, it's pretty good.

I woke up inside the headache. The headache is a room where I have to stay as I cannot afford to pay rent anywhere else. Every hair aches to the point of turning gray. There is an ache inside that Gordian knot, the brain, which wants to do so much in so many directions. The ache is also a half-moon hanging down in the light-blue sky; the color disappears from my face; my nose is pointing downward; the entire divining rod is turning down toward the subterranean current. I moved into a house built in the wrong place; there is a magnetic pole just under the bed, just under my pillow, and when the weather chops around above the bed I am charged. Time and again I try to imagine that a celestial bonesetter is pinching me through a miraculous grip on my cervical vertebrae, a grip that will put life right once and for all. But the house of headache is not ready to be written off just yet. First I have to live inside it for an hour, two hours, half a day. If at first I said it was a room, change that to a house. But the question now is this: Is it not an entire city? Traffic is unbearably slow. The breaking news is out. And somewhere a telephone is ringing.