Seed in Snow - by Knuts Skujenieks (Paperback)

About the Book

The first bilingual U.S. publication of renowned Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks, which was written during seven years of Soviet imprisonment.

Book Synopsis

The first bilingual U.S. publication of renowned Latvian poet Knuts Skujenieks, which was written during seven years of Soviet imprisonment.

Review Quotes

"Skujenieks makes his own emotions so gigantic that even the trees and the sun itself share them. The pines themselves want to escape, the sun is saddened, and yet, because the landscape shares in the prisoners' suffering, that suffering is made bearable. . . . Nature, fierce and simple, is always interwoven with emotions in these poems. . . . Skujenieks' strength is his ability to universalize his experience. . . . The poems in Seed in Snow can use this sort of shared experience to transport the reader into a far-off reality most of us will never experience." --Words Without Borders

"Although Skujenieks's poetry has been translated into more than thirty languages, this is the first collection in English. The selection is centered on the years [he was imprisoned] in Mordovia. The poems are highly diverse in style, tone, and motif, but throughout, despite a sometimes dark worldview, an irrepressible spirit keeps breaking through. He shows emotion and man's engagement with others and with the world around him in voices other than his own, both human and taken from nature: voices as varied as that of the biblical Jacob, the poet Vallejo, a road, and a snowflake. He creates a sense of univer-sality by conflating eras and events." --Bitite Vinklers, from the Introduction

About the Author

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.