Hunger Like Starlings

This insightful collaborative project, funded by the Edwin Morgan Trust and facilitated by Ken Cockburn in 2019, creates a firm linguistic bridge between English and Hungarian and explores what can be achieved through the art of translation. Having the same poem in two languages side by side on double-page spreads creates a real, tangible sense of collaboration. Even though an English reader might only understand the language on one side, the mirroring of enjambment, spacing and general rhythm emphasizes that no matter where we come from or what language we speak, we experience similar concerns. The epigraph of ‘Bird Woman’, ‘nothing is yet in its true form’, gives the sense that these poems are not yet at rest; this collection thrums with the anticipation of change and readjustment—with the potential to be reinterpreted and reimagined even further—thereby exploring the beautiful complexity and flexibility of language.

Phenotypes

Phenotypes offers readers a fascinating eye into the complicated inner-workings of Latin America’s, and specifically Brazil’s, racial injustices in a way that those within the Anglosphere of literature can understand.

Falling Is Like Flying

Falling is Like Flying is Manon Uphoff’s autobiographical exploration of the traumatic sexual abuse experienced at the hands of her tyrannical father. With a courageous and extraordinary story to share, Uphoff returns to the dark labyrinth of her childhood to ‘catch sight of what I was there: the final doll in the matryoshka. The doll you can’t open.’ Despite her initial reticence, the recollections gather momentum as she relentlessly relives the trauma endured within a family that was both ordinary and deeply disturbed.

A Luminous Republic

Pedophobia – the excessive fear of children – is a staple within the horror genre, unsettling and interrogating our primal instinct towards nurturing the young. There’s the sadistic son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, the adolescent cult in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, or the tribal warfare of stranded schoolboys Read More

To Leave with the Reindeer

‘You don’t know if you like animals but you’re desperate to have one, you want a creature.’ So starts this captivating and strange novel by Rosenthal in this new translation by award-winning translator Sophie Lewis of the 2010 original. Is To Leave with the Reindeer a novel, though? The book’s writing is a hybrid of Read More

THE BOOK OF THE PEONY

In a remarkable extension of thought, The Book of the Peony buds, expands and lets fall astounding petals: prose poems and haiku invoking an infinite, unattainable peony. The peony is allegorical. It is approached with the mind. It is the illusory peony of separation, of birth and death. Or, it is the shimmering unity beyond Read More

In Reality: Selected Poems

Seren Book’s In Reality: Selected Poems is the first major glimpse of poetry by award winning Luxembourger Jean Portante, translated for English speaking readers. The book gathers selected poems from his major collections, notably In Reality and What Does and What Doesn’t Come to Pass, and provides the original French in parallel with Zoë Skoulding’s Read More

Love is a Place

The three collections encapsulated in Love is a place – It wasn’t far away or difficult (2010), The signal is fading (2012) and From where to begin to love again (2014) have been translated from Catalan to English by Anna Crowe, a skilled veteran of poetry in translation. Joan Margarit is an award-winning poet who Read More

A Landscape Blossoms Within Me

Eeva Kilpi (translated by Donald Adamson) (Arc Publications, 2014); pbk, £9.99 Eeva Kilpi has herself remarked that her works have three main themes: the evacuation from Karelia where she was born, relationships and nature. These themes are prominent in A Landscape Blossoms Within Me, which consists of 70 poems chronologically arranged and meticulously translated from Read More

VERSschmuggel/ReVERSible

A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing.  Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts.  With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More