Volume 2 of Gunārs Saliņš’s Writings has been published

The second volume of Writings by Gunārs Saliņš has been published. The volume is edited by Kārlis Vērdiņš, who is also the author of the foreword and commentaries.

Volume 2 of Saliņš’s Writings brings together the distinguished poet’s diverse literary legacy. For the first time, Saliņš’s early poems are published together—works that the author compiled in the early 1950s in the unpublished manuscript The Invisible (Neredzamais). These poems are complemented by poetry from later periods, both previously published and unpublished, ranging from early works written in the early 1940s to individual texts completed in the 21st century. Most of the poems in this volume illustrate the poet’s development in his early phase and supplement the poetry included in Volume 1 with several outstanding texts that, for various reasons, had remained outside earlier published books.

A significant place in the volume is also given to Saliņš’s translations. Until now, he has been known primarily as a talented translator of Rainer Maria Rilke, yet his translations had not previously been included in any Rilke poetry selections published in Latvia. This volume reveals the breadth of Saliņš’s interests as a translator—authors who vividly represent modernism, as well as poets who experienced war, imprisonment, or life as refugees. The volume is further complemented by Saliņš’s few attempts at prose and by the section Marginalia, which includes texts co-authored by Saliņš and written in a light-hearted, playful tone.

A substantial part of the volume is devoted to Saliņš’s essays and reviews. Although in his professional career he taught psychology and sociology at a college, his interests within Latvian culture were primarily connected to literature, which is also the focus of nearly all his publications. Saliņš published several scholarly articles in which he closely analyzed contemporary literature in exile and in Latvia, viewing both separated literary spheres as parts of a single shared process and often referring to developments in more recent Western literature.

Volume 2 of Writings was published with the support of the State Culture Capital Foundation, the American Latvian Association Cultural Fund, and the Saliņš family.
Editor, author of the foreword and commentaries: Kārlis Vērdiņš.
Designer: Valdis Villerušs.
Literary editor: Signe Raudive.