The Great Enigma
book by Tomas Tranströmer
The Great Enigma (Swedish: Den stora gåtan) is a 2004 collection of poetry by the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. It consists of five poems in free format, followed by 45 haiku in eleven suites. It is one of the two collections Tranströmer wrote after his 1990 stroke, and it was therefore written at a slow pace with the left hand. It was published in English in 2006.
Content
Five free-form poems are followed by 45 which follow the form of the haiku, organised into eleven suites. The suites are loosely organised by genre and themes, which include the carpe diem motif, theistic epiphanies, nature depictions, snapshots from travels and reflections on death. The themes frequently blend.
Genesis
In November 1990, Tomas Tranströmer suffered a stroke which paralysed the right side of his body and damaged his ability to speak. He therefore had to cancel a large-scale poetry project he was working on, about the history of Europe, to instead write more concise poems. Several times he considered to quit writing altogether, but kept coming up with new ideas.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Great Enigma” as book by Tomas Tranströmer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book by Tomas Tranströmer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10468783. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1990 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Great Enigma” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.