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…
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 Impotence of War by Andrei Hvostov
In truth, the situation is more dire still – prose writers are unable to write anything at all during wartime, save for newspaper articles, essays or a few inconsequential fragments, which today only interest specialists like literary historians or academics.
Urban Echoes by Maximilian Murmann
Mati Unt, who was in his early thirties when he wrote the novel and lived in Mustamäe himself, knew that a cold, constructed living space is not conducive to life. This perspective is reinforced with quotes from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose Poetics of Space is just one of many references that Unt, who introduced…
