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debut in our pages, we've decided to showcase a hefty
entire chapter here.
Another highlight of this issue's Northern Idyll is the taut,
evocative prose of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's
The
Heart of
Man
, the final novel of his masterful Icelandic trilogy. It's
not yet available in English – you can read it only here. And
there's poetry from Shetland Scots, a dialect which retains
strong ties to Old Norse, with echoes in the musculature of
present-day English. Christine de Luca, the new Poet
Laureate of Edinburgh, performed in our launch events in
the Edinburgh Festival and was a bit taken aback that we're
only presenting her poems in English "translation" here.
Stay tuned, when
Trafika Europe Radio
starts up we'll
feature an invigorating reading from her in her native
Shetland dialect.
This issue also features dream-like new prose from
Slovenia, poetry from Occitan – in pieces like supernally
polished stones – and new French fiction exploring
mathematician Gödel's flight from the Nazis to Princeton,
and much more. All title pages showcase sublime photos of
Europe by our guest artist for this issue, Mark Chester.
We've made this quarterly journal to feel like a print digest
online, so feel free to slow down – if you're on a PC then
please go "full-screen" via the icon below the book, and you
can always zoom in for an even larger view – and savour
with us some great new works of European literature.