The Baltic Sea Library is a web-based literary project run by a group of editors from all the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, plus Iceland. The website resembles an anthology and contains poetry, novel excerpts, and other genres in all the literatures of the region. The texts reach across time from antiquity — Tacitus’s Germania and Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia — to today's contemporary Estonian prose. The unifying aspect is something the editors call “Balticness”, and each text is accompanied by an explanation of its connection to the Baltic Sea. Balticness brings the material together and allows the works and the places to be reflected in a context broader than the national literary canon. Conversely, Balticness also acts as a filter; the selection is deliberately narrow. Translation is central to the project. The visitor will find Tomas Tranströmer’s poem cycle “Baltics” translated into the Nordic and Baltic languages and into English. The ambition is for all the original texts to be presented alongside professional translations to the other languages of the region, and to English in order to make the texts more widely available.

Read more on balticworlds.com