Even though Milan Šelj is a translator of poetry from English into Slovene, and has lived in the UK and spoken English on an everyday basis for some time, Tracing the Unspoken is his first book in English (he has published four poetry collections and a novel in Slovenia). What a daring debut it is. …
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This book offers a very intricate, highly precise collage of images, each capturing something about the times we live in. It shows various versions of the discontent and crises that have become the trademark of our era. Each chapter can be read as a short story – at least that was how I started my …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews PIXEL by Krisztina Tóth”
I delved eagerly into this book, excited to have the chance to learn more about the Bauhaus outside of my more usual art-historian context. The book tells the story of a Bauhaus student, Luise Schilling, who first does a stint in Weimar and then, after a three-year break, comes back to study at the Bauhaus …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews BLUEPRINT by Theresia Enzensberger”
These are very intimate poems; reading them is like peeping into somebody’s private space or spying between the pages of a diary that was written only for the author herself. There is, therefore, a lot of fragility here; the poet is delicately exposing herself to us. One does feel like an intruder at times, even, …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews TIDAL EVENTS. SELECTED POEMS by Mária Ferenčuhová”
This is the fifth volume in the Periscope series of translated poetry by the New York-based publisher A Midsummer Night’s Press, following One is None by Kätlin Kaldmaa, Anything Could Happen by Jana Putrle Srdić, Dissection by Care Santos and Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė (the last was reviewed in The Baltic Riveter last year). All of these books are pocket-size. And I mean it: …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews HAVING NEVER MET by Inga Pizāne”
This is a very special collection, consisting of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems and prose poems written in French during her stay in Paris in the years 1960–1964 and later, back in Buenos Aires, shortly before her suicide in 1972. Like her Spanish-language poems, the French ones (later also self-translated into Spanish) are full of …
I keep staring at the titles of Ilzė Butkutė’s two poetry collections – Caravan Lullabies and Carnival Moon – and I’m evermore sure that the alliteration cannot be accidental. The words mirror each other even more closely in the original Lithuanian: ‘karavanų’ and ‘karnavalų’. In fact the English collection, entitled Caravan Lullabies, consists of two parts, each a selection of …
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Often, without much thought (and quite insensitively), we consider other cultures to be intrinsically different from our own; we imagine our communities as divided from each other by huge crevices that are difficult or simply impossible to bridge. And yet the bridging happens, sometimes even when we don’t try. We stare at the divide and …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: SEVEN STONES by Vénus Khoury-Ghata”
Reading this book is like plunging head-first into deep water. You don’t know what awaits – either in the depths, or even right under the surface. You quickly learn, however, that you should expect anything and everything. There are moments when you swim smoothly through long passages, and these almost lull you. But then a …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: THE GREEN CROW by Kristīne Ulberga”
Julia Fiedorczuk, ELNet’s recent guest at one of our Euro Stars events, is known principally as a poet and a critic who popularised the idea of ecopoetry. She has published five collections of poems in her native Poland (Oxygen, translated into English by Bill Johnston, is about to be published in the US by Zephyr …
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We meet the protagonist and narrator of Yasmina Khadra’s The Angels Die just before his execution. Turambo is an Algerian Arab living under French colonial rule in the 1920s. He lived in stark poverty as a child but later also experiences fame and fortune. However, it is the poverty and oppression that leave the strongest …
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The Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki spent several years in Iceland before moving to his current home of Austria. His Lullaby for a Hanged Man is partly his own story and partly that of two men he met in Iceland: the eccentric Croat Boro and Szymon Kuran, the Polish violinist, jazz musician and composer. They are …
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