Slovak Literature in English Translation

The collection Fragment of a (Knight’s) Forest gathers three sequences in which Ivan Štrpka maps the medieval quest of Perceval onto a contemporary Europe of trains, metro platforms, airports and vanished cinemas. The poems move through a recurring vocabulary of mirrors, shadows, empty hands and disappearing figures, drawing on Meister Eckhart and Paul Celan to pursue a mysticism of negation. Štrpka’s lines, supple in John Minahane’s translation, shift between long meditative passages and compressed lyric, registering childhood, exile and the instability of the photographic image. What emerges is a poetics of perpetual transit, where selfhood thins towards its own vanishing and the forest is at once chivalric romance and inner ground.