Launch reading by Ana Blandiana, Krisztina Tóth & Charlotte Van den Broeck with their translators
We were joined online by Ana Blandiana, Krisztina Tóth, Charlotte Van den Broeck and their translators Paul Scott Derrick, Viorica Patea, George Szirtes and David Colmer for our February 2025 launch event. All three poets and their translators celebrated the publication of their books by reading live and discussing their work with one another and the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below or here: https://www.youtube.com/live/SiYFLYPrR74.
The publication of these books has been made possible with generous support for translation costs provided by the Romanian Cultural Institute (for Ana Blandiana), English PEN's PEN Translates programme (Krisztina Tóth) and Flanders Literature (Charlotte Van den Broeck).
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Krisztina Tóth (trans. George Szirtes): My Secret Life
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/my-secret-life-1366
Charlotte Van den Broeck (trans. David Colmer): The Inside of a Stone
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-inside-of-a-stone-1364
Ana Blandiana (trans. Paul Scott Derrick & Viorica Patea): The Shadow of Words
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-shadow-of-words-1365
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Krisztina Tóth (trans. George Szirtes): My Secret Life
Krisztina Tóth is one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, she is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. My Secret Life is the first book of Krisztina Tóth’s poetry in English translation. The poems were selected by her from five of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.
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Charlotte Van den Broeck (trans. David Colmer): The Inside of a Stone
After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020.
Whereas those earlier books often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes, the key sequence of The Inside of a Stone concentrates on desert landscapes and womanhood – and the emotional resonance between the two – while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman’s wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen’s magical healing.
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Ana Blandiana (trans. Paul Scott Derrick & Viorica Patea): The Shadow of Words
Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.
The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, and includes uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. In these poems aestheticism takes on a subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art.
[03 February 2025]
