Magnification Forty

by Tsvetanka Elenkova, Jonathan Dunne (Translator)

Overview

"These miraculous poems of everyday matter magnified by forty reveal our world in all its pristine glory - reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's household odes, but stranger. Her sketches of waterfalls are extraordinary, as if we are witnessing the birth of water and every inch hallucinatory. Her magnifying eye probes the roots of matter and spirit, where they intertwine and dance with light. Tsvetanka Elenkova has a mystic's eye, an inventive vision honed with surgical precision." -Pascale Petit

"In Magnification Forty, Tsvetanka Elenkova turns her piercing poetic intelligence upon the small things of the world. She lifts them up to us in all their revelatory and spiritual power. Elenkova is a visionary, who makes quietness speak and who reminds us that the miracle of embodiment is realised not only in the exceptional but in what's humble and quotidian. This deeply mindful book is a call for us to pay attention to what we experience. It's also a masterclass in the lucid and economical poetics that have made Elenkova into a leading European poet." -Fiona Sampson

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848619005
Publisher:	Shearsman Books
Publication date:	10/27/2023
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.27(d)

About the Author

Tsvetanka Elenkova (Sofia, 1968) has published six poetry collections and three books of essays in the Bulgarian language. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Magnification Forty received a PEN Translates award in 2022 and is the third collection by this author to appear in English, after The Seventh Gesture (2010) and Crookedness (2019). The Seventh Gesture has been published in French by Tertium Éditions and in Spanish by Vaso Roto, Crookedness in French by Corps Puce. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Absinthe, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Humanist, Poem and The Poetry Review. Her poem 'The Train' was selected for the sixtieth-anniversary issue of The Massachusetts Review. 'Cherni Vrah' featured in the United Nations anthology Happiness: The Delight-Tree. She is the editor of a bilingual Bulgarian-English anthology, At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria, which showcases the work of seventeen contemporary Bulgarian poets. In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious award Pencho's Oak in her native Bulgaria for the body of her work. She is currently working on a book of poems on the spiritual content of JMW Turner's paintings. More info on her website: www.tsvetankaelenkova.com.

Jonathan Dunne studied Classics at Oxford University. He has translated more than seventy books from the Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish languages, including nine titles by Manuel Rivas for Penguin Random House. His translations have received three PEN Translates awards from English PEN and been nominated for major literary prizes, including the International Dublin Literary Award and the Warwick Prize for Writing. He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press, the second largest publisher in the United States of books from Spain according to Three Percent. His translations from Galician include a two-volume bilingual Anthology of Galician Literature 1196-1981 / 1981-2011 and a supplement of Contemporary Galician Poets for the Winter 2010 issue of The Poetry Review (which can be downloaded for free). He is the translator of the anthology At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria. He has written four books on the theology of language, the latest of which is Seven Brief Lessons on Language (2023), and recorded a sixteen-part video course, 'Theological English', available to watch on YouTube. His personal website is www.stonesofithaca.com.