Poetry
Päikesepillaja
Not translated into English
Artur Alliksaar · 1997
Synopsis
The whole of the poems left in manuscript: first sonnets and rhymed quatrains of great elegance, then, from 1960, free verse in long lines, which owes as much to Whitman as to the old Estonian runic song. Alliterations, parallelisms, wordplay and paradoxes follow one another in teeming, often comic associations; the poems speak of freedom, self-fulfilment, human thought and the choice each person must make, even suggesting that nothingness might well not exist either.
Context
Collected by Urmas Tõnisson, with an afterword by Arne Merilai, the poems appeared in Tartu in 1997 from Ilmamaa: it is the most complete edition of a body of work of which almost nothing had been published in the author's lifetime. His verses, which circulated in the literary circles of Tartu, had first been gathered by Paul-Eerik Rummo in three posthumous selections, in 1968, 1976 and 1984. The 1997 volume became a bookshop success and was reprinted in 1999, 2004, 2007 and 2016.
Who it is for
More than four hundred pages of poems in Estonian, never translated as a book into French or English. It helps to know that most of it is in free verse, rich in alliteration and wordplay.
Prizes and reception
The work of the man whom critics regard as the foremost poet of the Estonian language, whose influence marked the whole generation of the sixties.