Pavel ?rut’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, ?rut’s Soviet-banned masterpiece is an essential addition to the canon of twentieth century banned literature.

Worm-Eaten Time is an elegy for ?rut’s fallen homeland, written in the months following the Soviet invasion. After the work was banned, ?rut 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 ?rut 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.