Fragment of a (Knight's) Forest gathers three sequences in which Ivan Štrpka maps the medieval quest of Perceval onto a contemporary Europe of trains, metro platforms, airports and vanished cinemas. The poems move through a recurring vocabulary of mirrors, shadows, empty hands and disappearing figures, drawing on Meister Eckhart and Paul Celan to pursue a mysticism of negation. Štrpka's lines, supple in John Minahane's translation, shift between long meditative passages and compressed lyric, registering childhood, exile and the instability of the photographic image. What emerges is a poetics of perpetual transit, where selfhood thins towards its own vanishing and the forest is at once chivalric romance and inner ground.
 
 
ABOUT Ivan Štrpka & John Minahane:
Ivan Štrpka is a poet, novelist, essayist and translator. From 1963 to 1969 he studied Spanish and Slovak at the Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University in Bratislava. He worked as editor of the magazine Mladá tvorba and editor-in-chief of the magazines Kultúrny život and Romboid. Selections from the poetry of Ivan Štrpka or his individual collections have been published in Polish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German. He is represented in many anthologies of contemporary Slovak poetry, published in English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Serbian and Belarusian.
 
John Minahane was born in Ireland in 1950. He has been living and working in Slovakia since 1996. Since approximately 2004, he has been translating Slovak literature into English, focusing primarily on the translation of 20th century and contemporary poetry. For his translations, in 2021 he received the Hviezdoslav Prize, the most important prize awarded to a translator of Slovak literature.