Delighted to have received an early review of Ulrike Almut Aandig, I am a field full of rapeseed, give cover to deer and shine like thirteen oil paintings laid one on top of the other, translated by Karen Leeder (Seagull 2020) from poet Annao Blasniak on the Eurolit Network.
It is a world filled with emotion, positively bright and hopeful at one end of the spectrum, and angry, evil and brutal at the other. These dark images are often of the archetypal variety, fairy-tale-like in a Grimm sense of the word, with all the menacing intensity that comes with it. Indeed, Ulrike Almut Sandig establishes an intravenous feed, linking her poems to traditional folktales, but it’s like blood transfusion – she takes these texts and makes them very much her own, uses them for her own, very contemporary agenda
I deeply admire the truly masterful job of the translator, Karen Leeder [...] ; the task is seemingly effortless, but in fact is nothing but. This is Ulrike Almut Sandig’s second collection in English, and also the second in Karen Leeder’s translation. To this particular reader it seems like UAS and her translator are a real dream team, so here’s hoping for more from them in the future.
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