Poetry
Nägu koduaknas
Not translated into English
Kalju Lepik · 1946
Synopsis
Poems written from 1942 to 1946, between the war and the first years of exile. A poetry of youth carried by an intense nationalism, of an almost biblical fervour, in which the lost country speaks through the poet's voice. The poem that gives the book its title imagines the return: the son comes back to the house where he was born, presses his face against the windowpane and waits for his mother to come and welcome him.
Context
The collection, subtitled poems 1942-1946, appeared in Stockholm in 1946 with Eesti Raamat, the house its author had just founded; it was his first book. Seven other collections followed over twenty years, in which youthful fervour gradually turned to irony, against the occupier as well as against the embourgeoisement of exile. All his poems were collected in Estonia in 2002, by Hando Runnel.
Who it is for
Seventy-one pages of poems in Estonian, never translated as a book into French or English. It helps to know that these verses draw on Estonian folk song, which a foreign reader grasps poorly.
Prizes and reception
The first book by its author, whom Ilse Lehiste regarded, in 1972, as the greatest poet of his generation.