Wholesale Jaan Kaplinski: Selected Poems - Paperback

by Jaan Kaplinski (Author), Hildi Hawkins (Translator), Sam Hammill (Translator) Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski (1941-2021) was one of Europe's major poets, and one of his country's best-known writers and cultural figures. He was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament in 1992-95 and his essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region. This selection includes work previously unpublished in English as well as poems drawn from all four of his previous UK collections: The Same Sea in Us All, The Wandering Border, Through the Forest and Evening Brings Everything Back. Author Biography Jaan Kaplinski (1941-2021) was one of Estonia's best-known writers and cultural figures. He was born in Tartu shortly after the Soviet annexation of Estonia. His mother was Estonian, and his Polish Jewish father, Jerzy Kaplinski, a professor of philology at Tartu University, died from starvation in a Soviet labour camp when Jaan was still a child. 'My childhood, ' he has said, 'passed in Tartu, a war-devastated university town. It was a time of repression, fear and poverty. Jaan Kaplinski studied Romance Language and Linguistics at Tartu University and worked as a researcher in linguistics, as a sociologist, ecologist and translator. He lectured on the History of Western Civilisation at Tartu University and was a student of Mahayana Buddhism and philosophies of the Far East. He wrote and published several books of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English, starting to write also in Russian in recent years. His first original collection of poems written in Russian, "Белые бабочки ночи" (White Butterflies of Night), was published in 2014, receiving a "Russian Award" in Moscow celebrating the best works written in Russian by foreign authors. His work has been translated many languages, including English, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Hebrew, Bulgarian and Czech. He had much in common with Gary Snyder, who wrote of Kaplinski and his work that 'he is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you.' After publishing English translations of three collections with Harvill in Britain, one of these from Breitenbush and one from Copper Canyon in the US, Kaplinski published Evening Brings Everything Back with Bloodaxe Books in 2004, a book combining work from three earlier titles published in Estonia, Evening brings everything back (1984), Ice and Heather (1989) and Summers and Springs (1995).