Poetry
The End of the Anchor Chain is the Beginning of a Song
Ankruketi lõpp on laulu algus
Ilmar Laaban · 1946
Synopsis
Poems written from 1943 to 1945, in which metaphors and associations renounce logical links. A chanted refrain, live free or die, answers exile; the poem that gives the book its title crosses childhood and its wisdom of snow, youth at the blood-stained window, then the salty spring of manhood, among fish that climb staircases and clouds hung like keys, to return endlessly to the same sentence: where the anchor chain ends the song begins.
Context
The collection appeared in Stockholm in 1946, one hundred and twenty-three pages, in the line of Breton's surrealism; the language is studded with coined words and new forms borrowed from Johannes Aavik, the reformer of Estonian. Its author afterwards stopped writing poems regularly. Ignored by Soviet dictionaries and banned in Estonia, the book circulated in copies among students before the work was republished in the country from 1988; the collection itself was reissued in 2008.
Who it is for
A little over a hundred pages of poems in Estonian; the title poem appeared in French in 1992 and in English in 2025. Be aware that there is neither narrative nor continuous sense to be found in them.
Prizes and reception
The first deliberately Surrealist collection in Estonian literature, through which that movement entered the language.