The scope of this blog

Responding to my view of how I see this blog, Eric wrote:

My only plaint so far is that Latvia and Lithuania are not included. Estonia is certainly tied in with Finland. But the Baltic countries do have many aspects of recent history in common. Their literature is fascinating. If we can embrace the whole of Scandinavia, disregarding language background (e.g. with Finnish, Lappish and Greenlandic), we could perhaps take on board the other two Baltic countries. If we have visitors from the Baltic states, maybe we could take on board all three.

I think that to include Latvia and Lithuania would be stretching the frame of reference a bit too far. Greenlandic literature was discussed because there is a genuine possibility that Greenland might become a sixth Nordic state. As far as I'm aware, there's no such possibility at present for Latvia and Lithuania. Also, as anyone who has visited them knows, those countries (especially Lithuania) are culturally distinct from the Nordic states, and while Estonia can be given guest status here because of its close ties with Finland and Sweden, I don't really see how the other two can fit the frame.

A similar problem occurred in the life of Usenet back in the early 1990s, when the newsgroup soc.culture.baltics was formed as a breakaway from groups like soc.culture.soviet and soc.culture.nordic. I think a separate Baltic literature blog might be a more interesting avenue to explore, and maybe you could think about setting one up, Eric? It would certainly be the first of its kind.

My feeling is that there's a lot of Nordic writing, especially in Finnish and Danish, that isn't familiar to readers from outside the region, and I would rather concentrate on exploring those literary areas, rather than widening the focus outside the Nordic region in the way you suggest.

Latvia via Swedish

Latvia is not part of this blog, but via the Swedish language you can get more than a sampler of a literature that always tends to fall between two stools: the Estonians go with the Finns, the Lithuanians with the Poles. Latvia remains piggy in the middle.

The Swedish translator Juris Kronbergs has been translating Latvian poetry into Swedish for decades. So anyone wanting to gain insights into what Latvian authors publish could do no worse than look at Kronbergs' translations of poets Vizma Belševica, Imants Ziedonis and Knuts Skujenieks, to name three leading names.

The first of these was the grand old lady of Latvian poetry; two of her sons became poets too. The second wrote a series of prose-poems, his Epiphanies. The third wrote poetry describing his years in the GULag as a result of being sent to Siberia for possessing a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica (!).