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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley

A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley

Tania Skarynkina’s stories mix life in a small Belarusian town with thoughts on world literature. She has an external naivety of the imagination that creates an Eastern Bloc magic realism. Sitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses, ‘Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me.’

Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.

Author

Tania Skarynkina

Tania Skarynkina

Books

A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley

Tania Skarynkina, poet and essayist, was born in 1969 in Smarhon, Belarus. She has worked as a journalist and illustrator. Her first poem was published in 1980. Her later poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and in book form. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the prestigious Jerzy Geidroyc Literary Award, and in 2017 she was shortlisted for the Grigor’ev Prize for Russian language poetry.

Translator

Jim Dingley

Jim Dingley

Books

Down Among the Fishes

A Large Czeslaw Milosz With a Dash of Elvis Presley

Jim Dingley was born in Leeds in 1942. The school he attended was one of the first in the UK to start teaching Russian in the aftermath of the launch of the first Soviet satellite. He continued his studies of Russian and other Slavonic languages at Cambridge in the early 1960s. After a brief stint working in the Netherlands and then in the British Museum Library (now the British Library), he worked in the University of Reading and then in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He retired in 2003 and has never looked back. His interest in Belarus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania began in 1966 and he is now quite literally married to the region — his wife, Ella, is a native Belarusian speaker from Miensk; without her help and support the translation of Natalka Babina’s book would have taken much longer and would have been much poorer.

Published by

Scotland Street Press, 2018
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Tania Skarynkina’s stories mix life in a small Belarusian town with thoughts on world literature. She has an external naivety of the imagination that creates an Eastern Bloc magic realism. Sitting by her window with a glass of cranberries in sugar syrup bought from a woman in the market who assured her they came from Karelia, she muses, ‘Perhaps they have some other kind of effect when you eat them. Spiritual maybe? So I eat and wait for the Karelian cranberries to work their magic on me.’

Skarynkina is impelled to spend the last of her money on a trip to Krakow to meet Czeslaw Milosz but never finds his address, so he remains to her an idol like Elvis Presley dressed in gold lame. Each story has a charm and imaginative flight of its own.

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