Download or read book The Mouseiad and other Mock Epics written by Ignacy Krasicki and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International brigades of mice and rats join forces to defend the rodents of Poland, threatened with extermination at the paws of cats favoured by the ancient ruler King Popiel, a sybaritic, cowardly ruler... The Hag of Discord incites a vicious rivalry between monastic orders, which only the good monks’ common devotion to... fortified spirits... is able to allay... The present translation of the mock epics of Poland’s greatest figure of the Enlightenment, Ignacy Krasicki, brings together the Mouseiad, the Monachomachia, and the Anti-monachomachia — a tongue-in-cheek ‘retraction’ of the former work by the author, criticised for so roundly (and effectively) satirising the faults of the Church, of which he himself was a prince. Krasicki towers over all forms of eighteenth-century literature in Poland like Voltaire, Swift, Pope, and LaFontaine all rolled into one. While his fables constitute his most well-known works of poetry, in the words of American comparatist Harold Segel, ‘the good bishop’s mock-epic poems [...] are the most impressive examples of his literary gifts.’ This English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski is rounded off by one of Krasicki’s lesser-known works, The Chocim War, the poet’s only foray into the genre of the serious, Vergilian epic.
Download or read book A Burglar of the Better Sort written by Tytus Czyżewski and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Poland, since the eighteenth century, has been marked by an almost unending struggle for survival. From 1795 through 1945, she was partitioned four times by her stronger neighbours, most of whom were intent on suppressing if not eradicating Polish culture. It is not surprising, then, that much of the great literature written in modern Poland has been politically and patriotically engaged. Yet there is a second current as well, that of authors devoted above all to the craft of literary expression, creating ‘art for art’s sake,’ and not as a didactic national service. Such a poet is Tytus Czyżewski, one of the chief, and most interesting, literary figures of the twentieth century. Growing to maturity in the benign Austrian partition of Poland, and creating most of his works in the twenty-year window of authentic Polish independence stretching between the two world wars, Czyżewski is an avant-garde poet, dramatist and painter who popularised the new approach to poetry established in France by Guillaume Apollinaire, and was to exert a marked influence on such multi-faceted artists as Tadeusz Kantor. A Burglar of the Better Sort offers, in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski, the entirety of Czyżewski’s surviving literary output, from surrealistic plays like Donkey and Sun in Metamorphosis and his inimitable ‘formistic poems’ through the playful Christmas ‘pastorals’ — which so delighted Czesław Miłosz — to his theoretical writings, which form the basis for his radically individual, shamanistic approach to literary creation. A truly global talent, Czyżewski belongs to the world, a world which, beyond Poland, finally has the opportunity to get to know him.
Download or read book Olanda written by Rafał Wojasiński and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I’ve been happy since the morning. Delighted, even. Everything seems so splendidly transient to me. That dust, from which thou art and unto which thou shalt return — it tempts me. And that’s why I wander about these roads, these woods, among the nearby houses, from which waft the aromas of fried pork chops, chicken soup, fish, diapers, steamed potatoes for the pigs; I lose my eye-sight, and regain it again. I don’t know what life is, Ola, but I’m holding on to it. Thus speaks the narrator of Rafał Wojasiński’s novel Olanda. Awarded the prestigious Marek Nowakowski Prize for 2019, Olanda introduces us to a world we glimpse only through the window of our train, as we hurry from one important city to another: a provincial world of dilapidated farmhouses and sagging apartment blocks, overgrown cemeteries and village drunks; a world seemingly abandoned by God — and yet full of the basic human joy of life itself. Our English translation of Olanda, which includes the radio play Old Man Kalina, brings one of Poland’s great contemporary writers of fiction to the wider world for the first time. These narratives may not contain the entire world, just like a village at the end of a dirt road running through ponds, that floods after a heavy rain, does not contain all that may be found in Warsaw. But the world they contain is an intriguing one, in which everyone, from aging beauties through gravedigger philosophers, defrocked seminarians and even the occasional politician, is welcome.
Download or read book The Monastery written by Zakhar Prilepin and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 1055 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late 1920s... Convicted of murdering his father, Artiom Goriainov is serving a sentence of several years on the Solovki Archipelago. Artiom is a strong young man who survives all facets of the hell that is the Soviet camps: hunger, cold, betrayal, the death of friends, a failed escape attempt and a love affair. Unlike the many political prisoners at Solovki, he has no strong convictions. He is an everyman who, like the Virgil of Solovki, simply narrates what is happening in front of his eyes. His only motivation is to survive. Founded in the 15th century on an archipelago in the White Sea, from 1923 the monastery became a “camp of special designation,” the foundation stone of the Soviet GULAG system. The novel describes a period when Solovki was being converted from a re-education camp for “socially damaging elements” into what eventually became a mass labor camp. The notion of a Utopia for “forging new human beings,” complete with a library, athletic events, and research laboratories, eventually mutated into a hell of despotism and brutality. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia
Download or read book Robinson written by Aram Pachyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson is the first book by Aram Pachyan, which earned him the highest governmental award in Armenia, The Presidential Prize for Literature. The volume is made up of 16 short stories; each story is like a small but sharp painting of various characters. The faces in these paintings look very familiar, like someone you know, or someone hiding deep inside you. An inescapable loneliness of people in the modern world is the main topic of the stories by Pachyan. This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.
Download or read book The Vow written by Jiří Kratochvil and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can something that exists merely as a literary text, say a story, come about in real life? Can reality, to put it another way, steal something from literature, the same way literature steals from reality? Such is the question that Libor Hrach, the author of The Adventures of the Wise Badger, fields one evening over a hedonistic supper in a tony Brno restaurant from Kamil Modráček, himself a burrowing animal of sorts, in Jiří Kratochvil’s novel The Vow. ‘Quite simply, I said, everything that has been written either has already happened, or is about to. You write a story, and you can never be sure if what you’re writing isn’t actually taking place two streets away from where you sit...’ If this does not send chills down the spine of the reader of The Vow, they have got a high tolerance for the creepy. Set in 1950s Brno, at the height of Gottwald’s Stalinist reshaping of Czechoslovakia into a Communist prison, and partially in today’s independent Czech Republic, Kratochvil, alternating between the dry Czech humour of Jaroslav Hašek and the uncanny, chilling otherworldliness of Edgar Allan Poe, takes the reader on a journey such as they have never been on before: to geographic areas in the beautiful Moravian city where no foot has set since the Middle Ages, and... places deep inside all of us, where most of us would rather never venture... Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Download or read book Ravens before Noah written by Susanna Harutyunyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-12-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel is set in the Armenian mountains sometime in 1915-1960. An old man and a new born baby boy escape from the Hamidian massacres in Turkey in 1894 and hide themselves in the ruins of a demolished and abandoned village. The village soon becomes a shelter for many others, who flee from problems with the law, their families, or their past lives. The villagers survive in this secret shelter, cut off from the rest of the world, by selling or bartering their agricultural products in the villages beneath the mountain. Years pass by, and the child saved by the old man grows into a young man, Harout. He falls for a beautiful girl who arrived in the village after being tortured by Turkish soldiers. She is pregnant and the old women of the village want to kill the twin baby girls as soon as they are born, to wash away the shame... This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.
Download or read book The Code of Civilization written by Vyacheslav Nikonov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 969 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his book, Vyacheslav Nikonov shows the origins of the modern world and traces the chronologies and histories of peoples and countries. Nikonov discusses the main centers of influence and forces that shape the world in which we live. The world demonstrates a variety of development models shaped by the national, regional, historical, religious and other aspects of each country. The center of gravity of world development is shifting from West to East, from North to South, from developed economies to developing ones. Thirty years ago, Western countries accounted for 80% of the world economy; now it is less than half. Asia, already home to most of humanity, will become a global leader in the coming decades. What does this mean? What will the world be like and what place will Russia take in it? Will American hegemony continue? Will China become a superpower? Will Europe become a museum for tourists from other continents? History has resumed its course and the world is rushing towards an unstoppable diversity. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
Download or read book Dramatic Works written by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Perhaps some day I’ll disappear forever,’ muses the master-builder Psymmachus in Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Cleopatra and Caesar, ‘Becoming one with my work...’ Today, exactly two hundred years from the poet’s birth, it is difficult not to hear Norwid speaking through the lips of his character. The greatest poet of the second phase of Polish Romanticism, Norwid, like Gerard Manley Hopkins in England, created a new poetic idiom so ahead of his time, that he virtually ‘disappeared’ from the artistic consciousness of his homeland until his triumphant rediscovery in the twentieth century. Chiefly lauded for his lyric poetry, Norwid also created a corpus of dramatic works astonishing in their breadth, from the Shakespearean Cleopatra and Caesar cited above, through the mystical dramas Wanda and Krakus, the Unknown Prince, both of which foretell the monumental style of Stanisław Wyspiański, whom Norwid influenced, and drawing-room comedies such as Pure Love at the Sea Baths and The Ring of the Grande Dame which combine great satirical humour with a philosophical depth that can only be compared to the later plays of T.S. Eliot. All of these works, and more, are collected in Charles S. Kraszewski’s English translation of Norwid’s Dramatic Works, which along with the major plays also includes selections from Norwid’s short, lyrical dramatic sketches — something along the order of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Dramatic Works will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone who loves Polish Literature, Romanticism, or theatre in general.
Download or read book Point Zero written by Narek Malian and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the whole of human history, people would kill each other in the name of God. They did not know that the God they fought for was the God of Power. The 11th century is known for two historical religious initiatives – the Crusades and Assassins of Syria. Since the 9/11 attacks, a new tragic era of terrorism began and spread from the US and all through Europe and Asia. The tragedy in Paris, France in November 2015 urged the writer to refer to the roots of religious extremism. In the first storyline of the novel Point Zero, the author pictures the start of the Crusades by Pope Urban II in 1095. The second story takes place in 1090 in Persia, where Hassan-i Sabbāh, an Ismaili missionary, establishes an extremist religious community and seizes a fortress of Alamut. The third story is set in present day Paris in November 2015 where a young French woman called Liz, and a young Arab man called Ali fall in love and are amazed at their differences, however, Ali’s traditional and religious family makes it complicated for them to be together.
Download or read book Subterranean Fire written by Natalka Bilotserkivets and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate intensity moves through the subjective, intimate voice of the poems of Natalka Bilotserkivets. Through translation, Subterranean Fire continues their mysterious pilgrimage to their second lives. From one of the true inheritors – touchstones like Anna Akhmatova, Gabriela Mistral, and Louise Bogan – the poems of Bilotserkivets inhabit us as they include us in their transcendent borderland. – American poet James Brasfield With great depths of feeling, Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry guides us into that uncharted territory where word meets heart. The poems, spare and often questioning, redeem that land between what is most difficult to grasp and most difficult to forget. – Dzvinia Orlowsky, American poet and translator Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poetry ...is characterized by tight form and elegiac feelings ... this reader was impressed by the liquid cascade of alliterations in her ... poems. – Professor Andrew Wachtel ...contemporary Ukrainian literature has been enriched by the unique pearl of [Natalka Bilotserkivets’s] intellectual and lyrical poetry. – Ukrainian prose writer, poet, and essayist Kost Moskalets I am certain that this first-rate modern Ukrainian poet could become a star of world lyric poetry... – Ukrainian poet and prose writer Ludmyla Taran
Download or read book The Night Reporter written by Yuri Vynnychuk and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of the novel The Night Reporter take place in Lviv in 1938. Journalist Marko Krylovych, nicknamed the “night reporter” for his nightly coverage of the life of the city’s underbelly, takes on the investigation of the murder of a candidate for president of the city government. While doing this, he ends up in various love intrigues as well as criminal adventures, sometimes risking his life. Police Commissioner Roman Obukh, who was suspended by administrators from the murder investigation, aids him in an unofficial capacity. Meanwhile, German, and Soviet spies become involved, and Polish counterintelligence also takes an interest in the investigation. The picturesque and vividly described criminal world of Lviv of that time appears before us – dive bars, batyars, and establishments for women of ill repute. The reader will have to unravel riddle after riddle with the characters against the background of the anxious mood of Lviv’s residents, who are living in anticipation of war. The Night Reporter is a compelling journey into the world of the enthralling multicultural past of the city.
Download or read book Absolute Zero written by Artem Chekh and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a first person account of a soldier’s journey, and is based on Artem Chekh’s diary that he wrote while and after his service in the war in Donbas. One of the most important messages the book conveys is that war means pain. Chekh is not showing the reader any heroic combat, focusing instead on the quiet, mundane, and harsh soldier’s life. Chekh masterfully selects the most poignant details of this kind of life.
Download or read book An English Queen and Stalingrad written by Natalia Kulishenko and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author traces the Queen Mother’s formative years, her family life in the palace environment, her growing adoration and ascension to the British throne, how she arranged aid to Stalingrad and was ultimately named an honorary citizen of that city, and other little-known details from the life of the Queen and her circle. With a foreword by Yuri Fokin, Russia’s ambassador to the UK in the period 1997–2000, who was personally acquainted with the Queen Mother, the book will undoubtedly appeal to the British public and to anyone interested in Russian-British relations and the two countries’ World War II history. Illustrated with photographs from private collections and from the Battle of Stalingrad Museum, some of which readers will see for the first time. Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
Download or read book Everyday Stories written by Mima Mihajlović and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short writings depicts different aspects of ordinary life: work, love, friends, family, sex, as well as language identity, immigration to the Wonderland, and nostalgia for the lost home. Often ironic about herself and her characters, Mima plays with genres to create a loosely-connected narrative throughout different stories. Her collection of “short” stories about the everyday include horror stories, a turnip tale, and a dictionary of unfamiliar words, among others, and a range of peculiar characters, such as Little Girl, Fear, Titoslav (Tisi, or T.), and Zoka, a boy from the Balkans, which are “probably somewhere in South America.” Seasoned with the author’s street maxims, the book is about the vicissitudes of life, East meeting West and West meeting East, and the ordinary that is extraordinary. Everyday Stories were first published in Bosnian as Obične Priče in 2018 by Bratstvo Duša, a well-known underground books and comics publishing house from Zagreb, Croatia, founded and run by the underground legend from ex-Yugoslavia, Zdenko Franjić. The black-and-white illustrations by Elvis Dolić contribute to the book’s unique character and indie feel.
Download or read book G osy Voices written by Jan Polkowski and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-10-30 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1970, amid a harsh winter and an even harsher economic situation, the ruling communist regime in Poland chose to drastically raise prices on basic foodstuffs. Just before the Christmas holidays, for example, the price of fish, a staple of the traditional Christmas Eve meal, rose nearly 20%. Frustrated citizens took to the streets to protest, demanding the repeal of the price-hikes. Things took an especially dramatic turn in the northern regions near the Baltic shore — later, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, which would eventually spark the fall of communism in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe — where the government moved against their citizens with the Militia and the Army. Forty-one Poles were murdered by their own government when militiamen and soldiers opened fire with live rounds on the crowds in Gdańsk, Gdynia, Szczecin and Elbląg. Jan Polkowski’s moving poetic cycle Głosy [Voices], presented here in its entirety in the English translation of C.S. Kraszewski, is a poetic monument to the dead, their families, and all who were affected by the ‘December Events,’ as they are sometimes euphemistically referred to. In his afterword to the collection, ‘Jan Polkowski’s Voices — The Antigones of the Baltic Coast,’ Józef Maria Ruszar notes that this work, in which Polkowski, as something of a medium, ‘enters the skin’ of the dead, the survivors, and their families to ‘speak from within his narrators,’ is something which ‘has no counterpart in the literature of Poland — or even that of the world.’ In its moving, subtle, yet powerful tribute to those who paid the highest price for the ultimate victory of right over wrong, liberty over oppression, Jan Polkowski’s Voices takes its rightful place alongside other immortal artistic threnodies, such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Henry Górecki’s Symphony III.
Download or read book Slavdom written by Ľudovít Štúr and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Why do you whimper and wail, O Tatra streams and rivers, who carry your plaintive lament resounding to the sea?’ asks the narrator toward the end of The Slovaks, in Ancient Days, and Now. They respond: ‘Because our human compatriots do not join together in memory, as we our waters mix with our origin, and because their lives do not resound booming, but roll on unconsciously, like hidden streams, silently to the sea of the life of the nations, young man!’ This quotation from the most famous prose work of Ľudovít Štúr (1815 – 1856) might be set as a motto to the literary career of Slovakia’s greatest Romantic poet, publicist, and political activist. For all of Štúr’s writings aim at one goal: the propagation of the national traditions of the Slovaks in an age when their nation was threatened with such repression from the Magyar majority in Hungary, that the complete extinction of the Slovak language and culture was a real possibility. Slavdom: A Selection of his Writings in Prose and Verse presents the reader with a wide selection of the creative output of a great Slovak writer, and an important Pan-Slav thinker. Divided in three parts: ‘Slovakia,’ ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘Russia,’ it reflects the development of Štúr’s thought, from his insistence on the importance of the Slovak past and the quality of Slovak culture, through his attempts to find a modus vivendi within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by uniting all of the Slavic nations of Austria together in a federation under the Habsburg crown (Austro-Slavism) to his arguments for all Slavs to unite under the hegemony of Russia, when the events following the Spring of the Peoples in 1848 proved Austro-Slavism a dead alley. Slavdom offers a generous selection of Štúr’s writings, from Slavic apologetics such as The Contribution of the Slavs to European Civilisation though selections of his poetry, chiefly, the two great chansons de geste centring on the ancient Great Moravian Empire: Svatoboj and Matúš of Trenčín. A must read for anyone interested in Slovak literature, Pan-Slavism, and European Romanticism in general. This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.
