Vizma Belševica

Vizma Belševica (born May 30, 1931 in Riga ; † August 6, 2005 there ) was a Latvian poet, writer and translator.

biography

Vizma Belševica's father, Jānis Belševics, was a worker, her mother Ieva (née Cīrule ) a housewife. With only one income and because of the alcohol problem of the father who lost his bakery company during the great depression of the Latvian economy, the family was poor. Vizma spent most of her childhood in Riga ; the city is the subject of her work, but the time she spent on the small farm of her relatives in Courland ( Kurzeme in Latvian ) plays a much larger role in her poems and texts.

During the 1950s Vizma Belševica studied literature at Moscow's Maxim Gorky Institute . Her first volume of poetry was published in 1955 . Her early works were influenced by communism , but later she distanced herself. In the 1960s, her standing in the Latvian SSR declined as she refused to adapt her writing to Soviet literary doctrine. The poetry collection Jūra deg (“The sea is on fire”) came out in 1966 . Especially with the poem “Marginal notes of Heinrich the Latvian in the Livonian Chronicle ”, published in the volume Gadu gredzeni (“Annual Rings”, 1969 ), she created major problems. The chronicle mentioned comes from the early 13th century when the German Order of the Brothers of the Swords conquered Livonia ; the parallels to the Soviet occupation of Latvia were unmistakable - also for the political censorship . A series of reprisals followed: Belševica was unable to publish for almost eight years and she was expelled from the Latvian SSR Writers' Union.

She used the forced rest period to translate Shakespeare , Hemingway , Pushkin and Ukrainian literature, but also Milnes Winnie-the-Pooh . After the ban on publication was lifted, new collections of poetry came out until 1987, when the son of Vizma Belševica, the poet Klāvs Elsberg, died under unexplained circumstances. He fell from a building belonging to the Writers' Union; possibly it was a political murder, which should also hit Belševica. Then she fell silent at first; It was not until 1995 that she published the first volume of the autobiographical novel trilogy "Bille".

Belševica worked with simple, high-contrast images of great symbolic power. In her poems and short stories, nature in all its forms plays a major role, including motherhood and the role of women. The texts that passed the censorship were translated and distributed in the Soviet Union and abroad.

When Latvia became independent, she was recognized: on December 6, 1990 , she was elected an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences . She has twice been awarded the Spīdola Prize , the highest Latvian recognition in the field of literature, as well as the highest medal of honor in Latvia, the three-star order . In 1998 she shared with Knuts Skujenieks the Tomas Tranströmer Prize, which was awarded for the first time . After 2000, Vizma Belševica was repeatedly discussed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature , most recently in 2004 . On August 6, 2005 , she died in Riga after a long illness, due to which she was ultimately dependent on a wheelchair.

Bibliography (selection)

Latvian original editions

• “Visu ziemu šogad pavasaris” (1955) poems
• "Zemes siltums" (1959) poems
• “Ķikuraga stāsti” (1965) short prose
• “Jūra deg” (1966) poems
• “Gadu gredzeni” (1969) poems
• "Madarās" (1976) poems
• "Nelaime mājās" (1979) short stories
• "Kamolā tinēja" (1981)
• “Ceļreiz ceļš uz pasaciņu” (1985) Two pieces for children
• "Dzeltu laiks" (1987) poems
• “Zem zilās debesu bļodas” (1987) fairy tales
• “Ievziedu aukstums” (1988) Selected poems
• "Baltās paslēpes" (1991) love poems
• "Bille. Triloģija "(Autobiographical novel trilogy)
  • "Bille" (1992 USA, 1995 Latvia)
  • "Bille un karš" (original title: "Bille dzīvo tālāk") (1996)
  • "Billes skaistā jaunība" (1999)
• “Par saknēm būt. Dzejas izlase “(1996) Selected Poems
• “Lauztā sirds uz goda dēļa. Stāsti ”(1997) short stories
• "Raksti, 1.-4. sējums “(1999–2002) Collected Works Volumes 1 to 4
• “Lirika” (2003) Selected poems

German translations

• Just because of the crazy Pauline ( Tās dullās Paulīnes dēļ , from Welta Ehlert's Latvian). In: Selected 6th short stories from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Edited and provided with biographical notes by Marijke Lanius (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1983), pp. 255–266
• Pielberry tree in autumn and other stories. Translated from Latvian by May Redlich, Eva-Maria Eussler, Andreas Ludden and Charlotte Torp. Hannover, Hirschheydt 1984. ISBN 3-7777-0054-1 .

Translations into Latvian

• "Dante Alighieri: Vita nuova" (1965, with Jānis Liepiņš)
• “Atdzeja” (2004) post-poetry

literature

• Anda Kubuliņa: Vizma Belševica . Publishing house Preses nams, Riga 1997.
• Ināra Stašulāne (Ed.): Latviešu rakstniecība biogrāfijās . Zinātne Publishing House, Riga 2003. ISBN 9984-698-48-3 .

Web links

• For texts in German translation, see www.literatur.lv

Footnotes

1. ↑ Helēna Demakova: National Identity, Religion and Culture . In: Ivars Ījabs, Jan Kusber, Ilgvars Misāns, Erwin Oberländer (eds.): Lettland 1918–2018. A century of statehood . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-506-78905-1 , pp. 229–249, here p. 243.