Poetry in translation. Paper. Perfect Bound. 90 pages
January 2026, ISBN: 978-1-952781-28-5 $20.95 $16.76 + S&H <<<<< SPECIAL ADVANCE ORDER PRICE
Note: You don’t have to have a PayPal account in order to use the PayPal button, just a credit card. This book will be published in January 2026.
Click below for delivery to Latvia and the rest of the world:
Note: You don’t have to have a PayPal account in order to use the PayPal button, just a credit card. This book will be published in January 2026.
Latvia has no national epic (such as Finland’s Kalevala), but an equivalent is the immense body of folk poems, the dainas––handed down orally over many generations, mostly by women. The dainas were first collected, written down, and published in 1894-1915, comprising more than 35,000 type texts; this definitive collection is in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
Widely sung or recited, the dainas are a cornerstone of Latvian culture, and the basis for countless works of music, literature, and art. They have also played a political role, most recently in the “singing revolution” leading to the renewed independence of the three Baltic states.
Because of the difficulty in translating the dainas, English translations have been very rare; this is the first collection in contemporary spoken English. The poems here are bilingual, for readers of English, Latvian, or both languages.
The subject matter spans all aspects of human life and of the natural world, including social relationships, rites of passage, work, oppression by foreign overlords, war, mythology, and singing. Central is the expression of a deep, intimate interaction between the human world and nature. A dominant presence is the sun, personified as a female, who is an important participant in human life, notably as a mother figure.
Stylistically the dainas are very condensed, laconic, and restrained, somewhat comparable to Japanese haiku. Multifaceted, they can be viewed as folklore, ethnography, social history, poetry. The focus here is the unique and remarkable poetic imagination.
Sun and Earth
Sun and earth, sun and earth––
Both are angry
With me:
My feet trample the earth,
But, sun––have I mistreated you?
•
Sun and earth, sun and earth––
Both are angry
With me:
I can bargain with the sun;
With the earth––not until
I give my body.
About Bitite Vinklers
Bitite Vinklers is a translator of Latvian folklore and contemporary literature, with work in numerous anthologies and journals, among them The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Two Lines, and Poetry Wales. Recent book collections of contemporary Latvian poets include Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire; Knuts Skujenieks, Seed in Snow; and Baiba Bičole, To Taste the River.