[healty-back]

The Baltic Quintet
Poems from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden
This is a new English-language anthology of poetry from five countries, all of which have coasts on the Baltic Sea. So the term Baltic refers to the sea, rather than any specific cultures.
These countries have faced one another, so to speak, for centuries, and have had trading and other links. Now The Lithuanian-born Canadian, Edita Page, has edited a collection of contemporary poets from the five countries.
The poets are as follows:
Estonia
Doris Kareva
Hasso Krull
Mats Traat
Elo Viiding
Finland (Finnish-speaking)
Saila Susiluoto
Ilpo Tiihonen
Markku Paasonen
Tomi Kontio
Latvia
Inga Abele
Amanda Aizpuriete
Anris Akmentinš
Peters Bruveris
Lithuania
Daiva Cepauskaite
Kornelius Platelis
Rolandas Rastauskas
Judita Vaicunaite
Sweden (including Finland-Swedish poets)
Johanna Ekstr?m
Lars Huld?n
Ann J?derlund
M?rten West?
***
The translators are: Inara Cedrinš (Latvian), Herbert Lomas (Finnish), Eric Dickens (Swedish, Estonian), Edita Page (Lithuanian).
The book was published by Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
As you can see, I translated poems there from two languages, but I'm eager to see the Latvian, Finnish and Lithuanian poems, whose translation I had nothing to do with. That's why the book is in the top right-hand corner of my entries. I only saw it for the first time yesterday.

See:

http://www.amazon.com/Baltic-Quintet-Estonia-Finland-Lithuania/dp/1894987268

[Gaxiciverfere]

Thank you very much for your recommendation, Eric. I'm afraid my familiarity with Estonian poetry is limited to Kreutzwald's Kalevipoeg, as well as a handful of sonnets by Mary Under (a great poetess, in my opinion!); and from Latvia, I've only read Andrejs Pumpurs' The Bear-Slayer. Unimpressive, I know, but Baltic literature isn't really my specialty (although I'm avidly interested in the Baltic folk-song tradition).

I will add this little anthology to my Wish List.

[healty-back]

As Estonia is such a tiny country, there is pitifully little of their classic literature available in English translation. I have to admit that I have never read the Kalevipoeg in its entirety, having relied mostly on summaries. The German scholar Cornelius Hasselblatt says in his book on Estonian literature, while praising the efforts of Kreutzwald:

Gerade aufgrund des geringen Anteils an authentisher Folklore bleibt der Kalevipoeg ein sehr individuelles Kunstwerk und dadurch in erster Linie Kreutzwalds und niemandes anderen Sch?pfung. i.e.

Especially because of the small amount of authentic folklore, the Kalevipoeg remains in the first instance Kreutzwald's creation, and no one else's. Source: Geschichte der estnischen Literatur, Cornelius Hasselblatt, 2006, page 240.

As a translator from the Estonian, I am obliged to know something of the myths involved, but as with the Finnish epic the Kalevala, on which certain strands of the Kalevipoeg are based, there is an element of cobbling together from older songs and folk poems. Elias L?nnrot did the same with the Kalevala, but drew on more authentic material, as I believe. Hasselblatt stresses the fact that L?nnrot created something more rounded and whole.

*

As for Marie Under (1883-1981), I too am gradually discovering her poetry, because over the last year I have read (and translated) a good deal more poetry than before. Her life was split in two by the large-scale diaspora of Estonian people in 1944, and she spent the rest of her life after that in Swedish exile. The Estonians in Estonia were part of the USSR, and the KGB was suspicious of the Swedish exile community. So little literature trickled back to Estonia. But Under essentially produced the bulk of her most memorable poetry while still living in Estonia. She was, after all, about 60 when she arrived in Sweden. Between 1904 and 1942 she produced eleven collections of poetry. After that, only three. The book I've got contains about 460 pages of her poetry.

*

I chose the Estonian poems for the anthology more or less by myself, with a little lobbying from the authors.

I have to say that "Baltic literature" doesn't really exist as such, because the three Baltic nations, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, tend to go their own ways. For reasons of language (one Finno-Ugrian language, two Baltic ones) and religion (the Protestant-Catholic divide runs down the middle of Latvia, from west to east) they would have ignored one another more, were it not for the fact that the Russians, Swedes, and Baltic German barons treated them in rather similar fashion, over the centuries.

Despite what I said above, the Estonians are nonetheless making the most headway in literary visibility abroad, and I am happy to help in this respect. The Lithuanians are slower, the Latvians slowest of all.