Magnification Forty - Elenkova, Tsvetanka

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Résumé :
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 ?ditions 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....

Biographie:
Tsvetanka Elenkova has published six poetry books and two books of essays (one on the Balkans and another on Bulgarian frescos). Crookedness is her fourth poetry collection and has also appeared in a French edition, as Distortions. Her previous collection, The Seventh Gesture, has appeared in English with Shearsman Books, in French and Serbian. Individual poems have been translated into fifteen languages and have appeared in the magazines Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem, Poetry Review and The Massachusetts Review among others. She has been a guest at various festivals including Lod?ve, Struga, Tinos and Vilenica and recently received the prestigious literary award Pencho's Oak for the body of her work. She is the editor of At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria (Shearsman Books, 2012) and has translated international authors such as Raymond Carver, Rosal?a de Castro, Bogomil Gjuzel, Manuel Rivas, Fiona Sampson and the bhakti poets in Speaking of Siva into her native Bulgarian. She is a doctoral student in theology at Sofia University, where she is writing a thesis on mysticism in the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus....

Sommaire:
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...