The Swing in the Middle of Chaos [Paperback]

Sylva Fischerova (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1852248599 | ISBN-13: 978-1852248598

Fischerova is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist, she writes poetry with vivid imagination as well as historical reach. Her poetry moves in and out of historical events, with an understanding and loving eye on our frailties as well as our corruptive acts, against the backdrop of her commanding sense of space and time. Mixing semantic and sonorous sense, her poems come to life through metamorphosed moments, showing that nothing can be taken literally. ""The best translations are those that don't appear to be translations - these poems are stunning as poems - rippling with metaphor, spontaneous, terse but nuanced. Driven by a restless moral intelligence which never loses urgency, Fischerova's poems mix hope with irony, showing why the world makes us ache."" -Dennis Schmitz ""Mostly the poems seem to concern themselves with children and with God's existence. Parenthood seems to have matured the verse of Sylva Fischerova...The translations are excellent and do not read like translations, the highest form of praise one can proffer to the translators"" -World Literature Today

Editorial Reviews

Review

The best translations are those that don't appear to be translations - these poems are stunning as poems - rippling with metaphor, spontaneous, terse but nuanced. Driven by a restless moral intelligence which never loses urgency, Fischerova's poems mix hope with irony, showing why the world makes us ache. --Dennis Schmitz

Mostly the poems seem to concern themselves with children and with God s existence. Parenthood seems to have matured the verse of Sylva Fischerova. --World Literature Today

About the Author

Sylva Fischerova was born in 1963 in Prague. She grew up in the Moravian town of Olomouc as a daughter of non-Marxist philosopher whose works were banished under communist rule. She returned to Prague to study philosophy and physics, and later Greek and Latin, at Charles University where she now teaches ancient Greek literature and philosophy. She has published six volumes of poems in Czech, and her poetry has been translated and published in numerous languages. An earlier selection of her poems, The Tremor of Racehorses, translated by Ian and Jarmila Milner, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. She recently began to write prose, and a book of her stories Miracle, as well as a book for children, appeared in 2005.

Product Details

• Paperback: 95 pages
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd (June 17, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852248599
• ISBN-13: 978-1852248598
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,598,105 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)