The Blue Butterfly: The Balkan Trilogy, Vol. 1 (Balking Triology) - Softcover

Berengarten, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848611773 ISBN 13: 9781848611771

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2011

Synopsis

Poetry. Volume 3 of Berengarten's Selected Writings. THE BLUE BUTTERFLY has two points of departure. The first is a Nazi massacre in former Yugoslavia. On October 21st, 1941, seven thousand men and boys from Kragujevac, a town in central Serbia, were marched out to the nearby hills and gunned down. The poet Richard Berengarten visited the site of this atrocity, on May 25th, 1985. As he was queuing to enter the memorial museum, a blue butterfly descended onto the forefinger of his writing hand.

This extraordinary and powerful book takes off from these two episodes. The title poem is already famous in former Yugoslavia in the translation by Danilo Kiš and Ivan V. Lalic. In Serbia, Berengarten has been honored with the international Morava Prize for Poetry. In the UK, an early unpublished draft of this sequence was awarded the Wingate-Jewish Quarterly Prize in 1992.

THE BLUE BUTTERFLY unflinchingly explores both revenge and forgiveness, expanding from the Balkan historical context to the present time. The complete book has been a long time in the making. Because it examines profound and important issues, because it does not flinch from asking large questions, because it shapes a crafted, vital, living poetry out of suffering and tragedy, and because it insists on hope and pleads for joy, this is a book which has moral implications on many levels. Both passionate and thoughtful, demanding and rewarding, it is European in context and universal in scope and relevance.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Burns (aka Richard Berengarten) is a European poet who writes in English and lives in Cambridge. He was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. He has lived in Greece, Italy, the UK, the USA and former Yugoslavia, and has travelled widely in other countries. He has published more than 20 books. In 1975, he launched and coordinated the first international Cambridge Poetry Festival. As a theorist, he is especially interested in poetry universals. His poems have been translated into 21 languages. He is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge and Preceptor at Corpus Christi College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1848611773
• ISBN 13: 9781848611771
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 172