A Farewell to Everything

Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Slovakia to a Hungarian and Slovenian parents and spent her childhood in Budapest Ljubljana and Trieste. From 1965-1971 she studied Slav Languages & Literature and Romance Languages & Literature in Zürich Paris and St Petersburg and in 1971 was awarded a doctorate for her dissertation on the 'Theme of Loneliness in Russian Literature' later published in Berne.Ilma Rakusa writes poetry prose and essays in German and translates from French Russian Serbo-Croat and Hungarian into German. This volume is a translation of her 1997 German collection Ein Strich durch alles a collection of 90 nine-liners composed over a 21-month period in various locations. These elliptical poems mark a new departure in her work. This English-only volume is the first full-length English translation of her poetry to appear and is her first UK publication.