Petr Hruška is widely considered one of the most important Czech poets writing today, renowned for his acute powers of observation. In I Caught Sight of My Face, translated from the Czech by Joshua Mensch, Hruška exchanges the lyricism of his previous collections for an epic voice that contemplates the contemporary world through the lens of the distant past. And not just any past: his poetic cycle draws on The First Voyage around the World, written five centuries ago by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few to survive Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of discovery (1519–22). However, this is no glorious saga of heroic endeavour. Hruška adopts the perspective of the Venetian adventurer to show how little human behaviour has changed in half a millennium. Then as now, mankind is anxious, insecure, sometimes cowardly, xenophobic and violent. The poem’s deceptively simple, accessible style conveys a profound and complex reflection on our capacity for evil.

Petr Hruška (* 1964) is a poet and literary historian who lives in Ostrava, Czech Republic. His poetry has won several state and international awards, including the Czech State Award for Literature in recognition of his collection Darmata (To No Travail, 2012) and Magnesia Litera, the most prestigious annual literary award in the Czech Republic, for his collection Spatřil jsem svou tvář (I Caught Sight of My Face, 2022). Collections of Hruška’s poetry have been translated into French, German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Croatian.