Poetry
Melnā saule
Not translated into English
Gunars Saliņš · 1967
Synopsis
The great American cities, their skyscrapers and their modern culture intersect there with Latvian landscapes, folk songs and ancient motifs, and the poet leaps from one to the other or fuses them together, until time and space come undone. Nature enters the city: in Pilsētā pavasaris, grass and violets grow on a man's face and spread to other passers-by. Elsewhere the dream consoles, since dreams have their own realism, and in Ūdeņi a mother wakes from a dream of death as her son wakes from life.
Context
The author's second collection, after Miglas krogs in 1957, the book appeared in 1967, and LSM praises its graphic layout. Nora Valtere, in Latvija Amerikā of 6 January 1968, follows two opposing threads in it, the American metropolis and the Latvian countryside; Jānis Rudzītis, in Laiks of 14 February, sees Saliņš as a deeply Latvian surrealist, nourished by the dainas and by nostalgia for his homeland. Valda Melngaile wrote in 1970 that his idylls are imagined, but that they come to life before the reader's eyes. The Lithuanian encyclopaedia ranks him among the pioneers of Latvian surrealism.
Who it is for
A surrealist and colourful poetry, in which old Latvian songs surface beneath the streets of New York.
Prizes and reception
Winner of the Cultural Fund Prize in 1967, hailed in Laiks as an event in Latvian lyric poetry.
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