Biography Essay

For most of her creative life Vizma Belsevica, the most widely recognized Latvian poet of the second half of the twentieth century, lived in a society where freedom of expression was denied. But she produced a remarkable quantity and quality of lyric poetry, and her lyrical voice is also audible in her epic historical and philosophical poems and in her prose works. Her oeuvre comprises poetry, short stories, reminiscences, children's books, motion-picture scripts, and translations into Latvian of English, Ukrainian, Russian, and Italian poetry and prose. Her own works have been translated into some forty languages, most extensively into Russian, the Scandinavian languages, and German. Belsevica has made recordings of her poetry, and many of her poems have been set to music. Her career falls into a youthful period, a mature period interrupted by eight years of enforced silence, and a decade during which she wrote...