Product details
- ISBN 9781836360087
- Weight: 300g
- Dimensions: 132 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 27 Sep 2024
- Publisher: Kulturalis
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
"This is a kind of poetics where precision of lyricism attains a meaning that crosses the boundary of language. And for that, I am grateful." — Ilya Kaminsky, contemporary poet and author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
Petr Hruška is widely considered one of the most important Czech poets.
Based on 'The First Voyage around the World', written exactly 500 years earlier by Antonio Pigafetta, Hruška's I Caught Sight of my Face turns the glorious saga of Magellan's voyage of discovery into an unsettling exploration of human behaviour, showing how man remains an anxious, insecure, sometimes cowardly, evil, xenophobic and violent being.
It is an uncomplicated, yet at the same time, deeply profound book, brought to life through illustrations by Jakub Špaňhel (1976), an acclaimed contemporary Czech visual artist, who creates an interesting dialogue between the text and its visual accompaniment.
Petr Hruška (1964) is a poet and literary historian who lives in Ostrava, Czech Republic. His poetry has won several state and international awards, including the Czech State Award for Literature in recognition of his collection Darmata (To No Travail, 2012) and Magnesia Litera, the most prestigious annual literary award in the Czech Republic, for his collection Spatřil jsem svou tvář (I Caught Sight of My Face, 2022). Collections of Hruška’s poetry have been translated into French, German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Croatian.
Joshua Mensch, who provides the English translation to Petr’s poetry, is a poet himself and literary translator based in the Czech Republic. He is a founding editor of the online literary journal B O D Y (bodyliterature.com) and the author of Because: A Lyric Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2018), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award in poetry.
