Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Time, in an award-winning translation by Deborah H. Garfinkle, introduces the seminal work of one of Czechoslovakia’s most important living poets to an
English-speaking audience for the first time. With dark humor and surprising tenderness, Šrut’s Soviet-banned masterpiece is an essential addition to the canon of twentieth century banned
literature.
Worm-Eaten Time is an elegy for Šrut’s fallen homeland, written in the months following the Soviet invasion. After the work was banned, Šrut ceased writing poetry for over a decade,
feeling that poetry itself had become meaningless in the face of occupation. Ultimately, the need to speak won out and Šrut began writing again, publishing unofficially in various
publications.
This ground-breaking translation was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a PEN Center USA Translation Grant. Selected poems fromWorm-Eaten Time have
appeared in TWO LINES, Tri-Quarterly Online, B O D Y, and The Massachusetts Review.
