Alexandra Buchler – författare

A Fine Line: New Poetry from Eastern and Central EuropeArc Publications Translations Series (parallel-text)A bilingual anthology, with a preface by Václav Havel, published by Arc Publications in association with the UK-based international organisation Literature Across Frontiers, presenting the new poetic talent from ten Eastern and Central European countries.The poets included in the anthology are as follows:Georgi Gospodinov and Nadezhda Radulova (Bulgaria)Petr Borkovec and Katerina Rudcenkova (Czech Republic)Kristiina Ehin and Akso Künnap (Estonia)János Térey and Krisztina Tóth (Hungary)Karlis Verdins and Sergeij Timofeyev (Latvia)Daiva Cepauskaite and Rimvydas Stankevicius (Lithuania)Agnieszka Kuciak and Edward Pasewicz (Poland)Emilian Galaicu-Paun and Ioana Nicolaie (Romania)Katarina Kucbelová and Martin Solotruk (Slovakia)Primoz Cucnik and Taja Kramberger (Slovenia)"This is wonderfully sovereign poetry. These writers were mostly students or even at school when their Communist regimes perished; the war and the post-war Stalinist terror happened to their grandparents. Their poise and their self-possession are startling; they seldom lament and have no interest in preaching. The encounter with Western abundance gives them fresh imagery, but also grounds for amusement and irony.""From their part of Europe, they bring a special joy in the natural and physical world, and also glittering metaphysical brilliance. This is a poetry of wit and complexity, never raw but always glowing with human feeling. As for the translators, it's impossible to praise them too highly. Imaginative, sensitive and yet loyal to the texts, it is they who have delivered this treasure intact to new readers."- Neal Ascherson

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 1The first volume in Arc's New Voices from Europe, a series of anthologies featuring the work of contemporary poets written in what might be described as the 'small' languages of Europe. The six young Slovenian poets - three male (Uros Zupan, Peter Semolic and Gregor Podlogar) and three female (Vida Mokrin-Pauer, Maja Vidmar and Natasa Velikonja) - who contribute to this anthology are from the post-postmodernist generation, the generation that came of age in the 1990s and that takes the freedoms of an independent nation-state as a given. Although their work may have more in common with that of poets in wider Europe (even North America) than with their predecessors in the Slovenian cultural tradition (as described in the illuminating introduction to this volume), they write with a distinctiveness and originality that, to quote from the introduction, "traverses the hitherto neglected terrain of colloquial speech, hybrid identities and cultural sensibilities of an urban capitalist milieu". This is a fascinating introduction to contemporary Slovenian poetry. "This is the first in a new series of bilingual anthologies from Arc, with the admirable aim of bringing the work of a younger generation of poets across Europe to a wider English-language readership. Six Slovenian Poets fulfils this endeavour with a varied selection of poets under forty, all published for the first time within the past decade and all, in their various ways, breaking with Slovenian literary tradition. These young poets reference the Beckhams, Dolce & Gabbana, Sinead O'Connor and Gilbert and George as well as Paz, Yeats and Auden: poems, as Gregor Podlogar comments in Ana Jelnikar and Stephen Watts' fine translation, for when '54 TV programmes / just aren't enough'."Modern Poetry in Translation

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 3The third in a series of bilingual anthologies of European poetry and an introduction to the here-and-now of Czech poetry, this volume presents the work of six Czech poets who belong to very different generations. Zbynek Hejda and Viola Fischerova are part of the generation which was exiled by the totalitarian regime of pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia while Petr Borkovec, Katerrina Rudcenkova, Pavel Kolmacka and Petr Halmay represent the younger generation which started publishing in the late 1990s. All six poets are widely known and highly regarded in the Czech Republic but are unfamiliar to English-language readers, so this anthology is an excellent introduction to the cutting edge of Czech poetry."Six Czech Poets opens with the work of Zbynìk Hejda, widely recognised as one of the most important Czech poets since World War II. One can see why... It is haunting work built upon landscapes, some part of the surface of which gets scratched away, leaving a view, to paraphrase the author, right down to the bone, the death..."Edinburgh ReviewZbynek Hejda, Viola Fischerova, Petr Halmay, Pavel Kolmacka, Petr Borkovec and Katerrina Rudcenkova have all had collections of poetry published in the Czech Republic and abroad. Hejda and Fischerova are two of the great names in late twentieth-century Czech poetry, much revered in their native land; while Borkovec and Rudcenkova are rising stars of the twenty-first century and more widely known.

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 2Six Basque Poets is the second volume in a new series of bilingual anthologies which brings the work of contemporary poets from Europe and beyond to a wider English-language readership, a series which aims to keep a finger on the 'here and now' of international contemporary poetry.The six poets included in this collection have played a defining role in the development of Basque-language poetry in the last thirty years, since the arrival of what we have come to refer to as the 'democratic age' in Spain and the Basque Country. They represent the diversity of voices and poetic schools that populate the contemporary Basque literary scene, where a variety of tendencies has emerged in the recent decades: a range of different poetics, use of various narrative styles, a preference for a non-aesthetic approach that dwells within the quotidian and an emergence of female voices that reclaim other codes and other universes.Direct, moving and thought-provoking, the poetry in the present volume gives us insight into the preoccupations of a literary milieu which may be marginalized by its use of an ancient language not spoken outside its territory but which is as powerful and original in its production as any of the literary centres in today's Europe.The featured poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia.

In these stories people strive to make a place, a living, a life with meaning in a new country or sense in an old one: from zero hour contracts in Bridgend and Munich to scraping a living as a mermaid on the streets of Barcelona.

Edited and Translated by Alexandra Buchler. A book of poems by Katerina Rudcenkova selected fromher four poetry books by the editor / translator AlexandraBuchler who will also write an introduction.