Poetry
Es ieeju sevī
Not translated into English
Imants Ziedonis · 1968
Synopsis
The collection gives voice to a personality aware of its own singularity, which challenges the dogmas and constraints of the world and holds reality to be more complicated than it appears. In the cycle Tēze, antitēze, the poet explores himself by untangling and listing his contradictions; in Pieturas zīmes, he seeks out apparent paradoxes in order to undo accepted ways of thinking. Entering into oneself is not an escape there, but a way of rising.
Context
Published by Liesma in Riga in 1968, the book appears in the Latvian Cultural Canon, along with a collection of 1988 and the prose of the Epiphanies. It marks the passage from a poetry that sang of progress, dominant since the annexation, to a writing turned towards truth and work on the self. Dzimtenes Balss and Literatūra un Māksla reviewed it as soon as it came out; Anita Rožkalne and Anda Kubuliņa have returned to it since, and Jumava reissued it in 2012, with an afterword by Silvija Radzobe.
Who it is for
A poetry of wordplay and paradoxes, which asks the reader to set aside habitual ways of thinking.
Prizes and reception
Probably its author's most famous collection, he being one of the most widely read and most influential Latvian poets of his time.