Autumn 2013

Intertextuality has become deeper and
its role as a poetic means has broadened in
Pärtna’s poetry: the new collection contains
translations of William Carlos Williams’
poems. We can again notice how Pärtna has
consciously searched for a style similar to
her own. The poetry of Williams, one of the
most influential modernists and imagists of
the previous century, was also centred on
everyday issues and the lives of common
people. Pärtna has studied English philology
and she has been interested in Beat
literature, (in her first collection, she
addresses Allen Ginsberg). She unites the
Estonian poetic tradition with American
modernism, forming a new niche in Estonian
modern literature. She synthesises the
personal and the general, and the outdated
and the modern, in such a way that their
different sides become a memory, and a
time-sensitive completeness of visions,
reflections, observations and contemplations
poured into a detailed language of images.
BM
Peeter Sauter
Ära jäta mind rahule.
a love story
(Don’t Leave me Alone. a love story)
Tallinn: P. Sauter, 2012. 396 pp
ISBN 9789949308392
extreme texts, introduced the “low style”, full
of vulgarisms, obscene details and slang into
Estonian literature. All Sauter’s books are
written in this style: he is an Estonian mixture
of Kerouac and Bukowski. He has also
translated books by both of these authors
and he admits having been influenced by
their works. Critics have characterised
Sauter’s texts as “pieces of a life”, and his
narrative avoids completeness and plot
development. “His text is self-centred, but
this self is an observer not an active
participant in his own life, and his attention is
focussed on small things: toes, socks,
making a sandwich, repetitive routine life”, as
well as navel-gazing.
Sauter, who has so far been known only
as a prose author, has recently become a
poet as well (his first collection of poetry
appeared in 2011), and his new novel Don’t
Leave me Alone is, actually, his most poetic
and emotional work of prose. It is, as with his
earlier works, full of free-flowing existence in
as close-to-life form as possible, but the
vulgarism-filled informal speech and
extremely naturalistic scenes of drinking and
Peeter Sauter (Photo by Scanpix)
For more than two decades, Peeter Sauter
(b. 1962) has been the main representative
of neo-naturalism in Estonian literature.
Sauter studied to be an actor, worked as a
journalist and copywriter, and now is a
freelance writer in a “house of poor writers”
in Tallinn (he has written a poem about this
house and he also is one of the central
figures in a documentary of the same title).
Sauter’s first book, Indigo (1990), which
became a cult sensation, hit a very important
nerve with the bohemian generation of its
time, who lacked the passion for change and
did not strive for truth and elation. Sauter,
who has always been known as an author of
E l m / A u t u m n 2 0 1 3