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Wolf One-Eye

Wolf One-Eye

by Juris Kronbergs

Bilingual English / Latvian edition

Translated by Mara Rozitis, with an introduction by Jaan Kaplinski

Part of our Visible Poets series edited by Jean Boase-Beier

Wolf One-Eye is an extraordinary cycle of poems — magical, mysterious, sinister, funny — about exile, in which the eponymous protagonist finds himself an exile from an ancient mythological landscape in a new realm of quarks and strange universes.

Dislocated and alone, Wolf travels through totally unfamiliar territory, closely observed by the other voice in these poems, that of the poet/narrator.

Kronbergs is himself an exile, having grown up as a refugee child in Sweden after the Second World War, and this gives his poetry a distinctiveness and resonance that is perfectly captured in Mara Rozitis's translation.

In its original version, Wolf One-Eye was awarded the Latvian Writers' Union prize in 1997 for best poetry collection. The present version is revised and contains a substantial body of new work.

Parallel text: Latvian / English

...it has novelistic qualities...[he] is an exiled beast travelling through a surrealist universe, trying to determine his fate. If you have a love of absurdist Eastern European drama, the madness of writers like Kafka, Kurkov or Yerofeev... then you should enjoy the journey.

Fiona Curran, Orbis 138, Autumn 2006

Paperback
136 pages
ISBN 1-904614-33-7
Published October 2006

» About Juris Kronbergs