Secrets on the Way: The Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer

  • 3 April, 2019, 12:00 pm-1:00 pm
  • 201 Moses Hall

Secrets on the Way: The Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. A Reading by Robert Hass and Screening of the Film “Secrets”, Produced by Kathryn Roszak. Musical Prelude by Mads Tolling

Performers: Robert Hass, Department of English, UC Berkeley; Kathryn Roszak, Artistic Director, Danse Lumière

Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, Nordic Studies Program, Department of English

Robert Hass reads from his selection of poems by Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer that he translated, and Kathryn Roszak screens and discusses her short film “Secrets”, a post-modern “tango,” inspired by Tranströmer’s great poem “Schubertiana,” a love story with two dancers seeking trust in New York City.
With a musical prelude by Grammy Award-winning violinist Mads Tolling.

The presentation will be followed by a Q and A with the audience.

Robert Hass is a poet and essayist who teaches in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. He is the editor of “The Selected Poems of Tomas Tranströmer” (Ecco Press) and has published numerous books of poems, including “The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems” and “Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005”, for which he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has also published the essay collections “Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry” and “What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World”, along with many other books of translation, anthologies, and scholarship, most recently “A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry” He served as the first US Poet Laureate from the West from 1995-97.

Kathryn Roszak is a curator, choreographer, and producer recognized for her company Danse Lumière’s work combining literature and the arts. She has collaborated on performances with Maxine Hong Kingston, Chana Bloch, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure. Her dance and theater productions have been presented by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, The 92-Y and La MaMa Theatre, New York, and the Copenhagen Cultural Festival. She received the John and Susan Diekman Fellowship in Choreography at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program where she founded the annual Women Ballet Choreographers and Composers Residency. She has produced choreography and taught for the San Francisco Opera Center and the American Conservatory Theatre. She has taught courses on dance, opera, film, and theater for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley, where she will teach a new course on “The Great Choreographers” starting in March 2019.

Mads Tolling, an internationally renowned violinist and composer, is a two-time Grammy Award-Winner and the 2016 DownBeat Critics Poll Rising Star winning violinist. As a former nine-year member of both Turtle Island Quartet and bassist Stanley Clarke’s band, Mads Tolling has spent most his professional life touring internationally. Since 2007 he has led his own group, Mads Tolling Quartet. “The Playmaker” released in the fall of 2009, features Stanley Clarke and jazz greats Russell Ferrante & Stefon Harris.

Event Contact: menghini@berkeley.edu