Epic
Mūžības skartie
Not translated into English
Aleksandrs Čaks · 1937
Synopsis
A cycle of epic poems devoted to the Latvian riflemen, whom we follow from the trenches of the First World War to the fronts of the civil war. Born of the memories the author kept of these men, the poems raise the soldiers to an almost legendary dimension and make of them symbols that go beyond the side in which they fought as well as the reasons for their fight.
Context
The first volume appears in 1937, and the whole is brought together in a single book around 1940, as the exhibition Čaka skartie in Riga recalled in 2015. It earns its author the Anna Brigadere Prize. The poet of Riga finds here another register, that of the epic, alongside the urban and romantic poems that made his name, and other poems on the riflemen. Aleksandrs Čaks has appeared in English in selections, Selected Poems, translated by Ruth Speirs in 1979, then Between Two Rains, translated by Inara Cedrins in 2013, and his poems were collected in Riga in 2001 under the title Dzeja, liroepika.
Who it is for
A long set of narrative poems. It is better to know that the cycle follows these soldiers beyond 1918, into the civil war.
Prizes and reception
Anna Brigadere Prize for a cycle that made these soldiers almost mythical figures.