Selected Poems in Estonian and English

The present book selection is the first attempt to translate Liiv’s poetry, on a larger scale, into a major international language. Liiv himself translated a few poems by Schiller, Goethe, Lermontov and Petöfi and, while working as a journalist, had to translate (from German) prose works by Cooper and Collins. He felt skeptical about translating.The present attempt to translate Juhan Liiv’s poetry into English has been made with full awareness that lyric poetry, which depends on sound and rhythm, cannot be translated in an ideal way. At the same time one should not ignore the international cultural fact that poetry has been translated even from Western languages into Chinese and Japanese ideograms and vice versa. Not to mention that in a number of major languages (e.g. English and Spanish) attempts to transmit in translation exact rhymes or rhythms of the original poetic work have been largely abandoned. Instead, the preference has been given to blank verse or free verse, which in all probability can convey better than rhymed translation the image structure and conceptual meaning from one cultural space to another.