Latvian poet, journalist and translator Knuts Skujenieks died on Monday at the age of 85, according to Latvian media reports.
Skujenieks translated poetry from some 15 languages into Latvian, and among others, he is owed the promotion of poets such as Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Antonio Machado and César Vallejo.
Very sad news for all lovers of Latvian literature. https://t.co/ZqJgGQt0Rk
— Latvian public media (@LSM_eng) July 25, 2022
Born in the Latvian capital of Riga in 1936, Skujenieks moved to a small town near the Lithuanian border after the death of his mother. He studied philology at the University of Latvia and literature at the Maxim Gorky Institute in Moscow.
From his biography the agency stands out Eph that in 1962 he was arrested after an accusation of anti-Soviet activities, for which he was sentenced to seven years of forced labor in a labor camp in the Mordovia region.
Upon his return to Latvia, he was admitted to the Soviet Union of Latvian Writers in 1972 and in 1978 his first collection of poetry was published.
During his stay in the gulag he wrote nearly a thousand poems, but these were not published until 1990, during the era of “glasnost” (or “transparency”) promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev.
His works have been translated into several foreign languages, most notably Swedish.
Skujenieks, president of the PEN Latvian Writers Club for several years, was also responsible for moving the organization back to the Baltic country from exile in Sweden in 1992.
Apart from his translations from Spanish, the poet is also known for rendering works from Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Swedish and English, among other languages, into Latvian. In 1994 he received the order of Isabella the Catholic and throughout his life he was honored with various awards in Latvia and internationally.
With information from Eph.
