Surrealism in Estonian Poetry
Editorial note The following essay by the Latvian poet and translator Guntars Godiņš accompanies the anthology Sirreālisms igauņu dzejā (Surrealism in Estonian Poetry, Neputns, 2023), compiled and translated into Latvian by Godiņš. The volume brings together poems by six Estonian poets from different generations – Ilmar Laaban, Artur Alliksaar, Andres Ehin, Jaan Malin, Marko Kompus and…
Notes on a Thin Black Book
On one of those shelves my partner spotted 10 Estonian Novels: Selected Excerpts and bought it for me. It’s a thin book, black, published by the Estonian Literature Centre.
The Trapper’s Epic
Thus the taiga is both magnet and mistress to Niika-Nganassaan, the hero of this book. He becomes the enlightened psychopomp of Nikolai Baturin (1936–2019), the one who leads the reader into this immense forest labyrinth.
We Have Always Been in Europe. A Conversation on Translating Lennart Meri’s Silverwhite
Realism is frequently used to justify very bad decisions. But for Meri, principles mattered. He once said that international law is our atomic bomb. For small nations, that is not a metaphor to be taken lightly.
Art and Politics. Editorial
Thus – literature is both bomb and door. Literature is an exit from the numbing political pressures of the world – not mere escapist fantasy but rather a politico-psychic penetration into the deeper core of reality, a door towards rebellious freedom.
Evoking Intimacy: A Conversation with Sveta Grigorjeva
I think intimacy is something akin to Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action: something that does not exist until two or more phenomena meet and become something new. As for how the world practises intimacy – well, I’m afraid that genuine intimacy, that close-close way of being with others, is becoming increasingly rare. I think, for…
The Nightingale and the King by A.H. Tammsaare
‘What does the nightingale sing about?’ he asked. ‘Of love and of freedom, our most gracious majesty,’ his servants answered him, bowing to the ground.
The Fourth Dimension by Friedebert Tuglas
The firmament swells over my face as a silken fabric. Wherever my gaze delves, it rises like a gothic arch into the heights, a tentpole holding up the sloping periphery. Like a blue-green-white tent nave, it has been thrown high over my being.
Francis Young on Lennart Meri’s Silverwhite
Silverwhite is a work of literary non-fiction of the historical imagination, and a great one. As Meri declares: ‘Literature offers not history but visions and, in the best case, historical possibilities’.
