Description
Poetry. Translated from the Czech by Matthew Sweney, Justin Quinn, and Alex Zucker. Edited by Veronika Tuckerová. Lost to the world for decades, Ivan Blatn was, according to the Czech Ministry of Culture, "one of the most significant Czech poets of the twentieth century." Blatn fled Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948, spending the rest of his life in England. This volume spans fifty years of his career and is notable for being the first major collection of Blatn's work in English, including multi-lingual poems and some poems written mostly or entirely in English. Our edition includes an Introduction by Veronika Tuckerová, a Foreword by Josef Skvorecky, an Afterword by Antonín Petruzelka, and Working Notes from the translators.
"The verses and fate of the poet Ivan Blatn...complete the fate of Czech literature, which transcended the borders of the nation, often struggling for survival." —Vaclav Havel
"For Czech-English émigré Ivan Blatn's poetry, terms like exile literature, subversion, appropriation, collage, pun, homophony, and even hybridity seem too limited, too stable. In an age where many—rightly—are suspicious of official verse cultures, here is the voice from a true underground—not the official alternative poetry of the day, but that minorizing, fluctuating underground that undoes hierarchical notions of language and culture. Blatn's heteroglossic poems are wonderfully strange, prosaic, sparse and distracted at the same time. They are as beautiful and singular as Vallejo's Trilce."—Johannes Göransson
Author Bio
Ivan Blatn was born in Brno in 1919 and established a name as a poet rapidly in the late 1930s and war years. He was associated with "Group 42," together with Jiří Kolař, Kamil Lhoták and others, and was also close at this time to poets such as Jaroslav Seifert and Vítězslav Nezval (with whom he later fell out). He left Czechoslovakia in 1948 and came to London, spending the rest of his life in London, Suffolk and Essex and died in Clacton in 1991.
Author City: UNK