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Seed in Snow

Knuts Skujenieks
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Anti-Soviet Sentiment
Author_Knuts Skujenieks
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B06=Bitite Vinklers
Category1=Non-Fiction
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Censorship
COP=United States
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Latvian poems in English
Latvian poetry
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Poems about imprisonment
Poetry in translation
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Soviet labor camps
Writing prisoners

Product details

  • ISBN 9781942683223
  • Weight: 226g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
  • Publication Date: 29 Dec 2016
  • Publisher: BOA Editions, Limited
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Description

This first US publication of Knuts Skujenieks—one of Latvia's foremost contemporary poets—is the author's most important and widely-translated body of work. Convicted in 1962 of anti-Soviet sentiment, Skujenieks wrote these poems during seven years of imprisonment at a labor camp in Mordovia. Vivid and expressive, this collection overcomes the physical experience of confinement in order to assert a limitless creative freedom.

A Love Poem

I would like clarity. To exclude
A relationship's tangled yarn.
Not a word.
Let reaction suffice.

So. Only so. And if the two of us
Are pitched alone against the world,
That we can instantly swing about
From face-to-face
And stand back to back.

Would that be too much?
But a poem cannot be written
If one awaits the bullet
From the back,
And not from the front.

Knuts Skujenieks was born in 1936 in Latvia, where he studied philology and history at the University of Latvia. In 1962, he was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and served a seven-year prison sentence in the Mordovia gulag. While there, he sent out many poems in letters to his wife, which were first published in 2002 as Sekla sniega (Seed in Snow). A polyglot, Skujenieks has translated into Latvian such poets as Lorca, Ritsos, Neruda, Vallejo, Galczinsky, and Tranströmer. He has received the highest literary and state honors in Latvia, as well as awards across Europe, including Sweden's Tomas Tranströmer prize, and his poetry has been translated into more than thirty languages. He currently lives in Salaspils, Latvia.
About Knuts Skujenieks
Knuts Skujenieks, born in Latvia in 1936, studied philology and history at the University of Latvia, and from 1956 to 1961 attended the Maksim Gorky Institute for Literature in Moscow. Soon after his return to Latvia, he was arrested on trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity and sentenced to seven years in the Mordovia gulag (1963-69). There, however, he wrote intensively and sent out in letters several hundred poems, first published in their entirety in 2002 as Sekla sniega (Seed in Snow). Returning to Latvia in 1969, he found publication of his work restricted, and made a living as a translator. A polyglot, he has translated into Latvian such poets as Lorca, Ritsos, Neruda, Vallejo, Galczinsky, and Tranströmer; poetry from little-known languages; and European folk songs. His first volume of poetry, allowed to be published in 1978, has been followed by four others, and his collected works (8 vols.) were published in 2002-8. Skujenieks has received the highest literary and state honors in Latvia, as well as awards across Europe, including Sweden’s Tomas Tranströmer prize, and his poetry has been translated into more than thirty languages (including collections in Polish, Armenian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Italian, and three in Swedish). He lives in Salaspils, Latvia. Bitite Vinklers is a translator of Latvian folklore and contemporary poetry and fiction. For the translation of the Latvian dainas she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant; her translations of contemporary work have appeared in anthologies (among them Shifting Borders: East European Poetries of the Eighties, ed. W. Cummins) and in journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry East, Subtropics, Notre Dame Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her translation of the poetry of Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire, was published in 2015. She lives and works as a freelance editor in New York.

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