These days a herbarium is seen as a catalogued collection of pressed dried plants with labels. Petr Borkovec’s Herbarium records poetic forms and linguistic formulations.

Poetry  |  English sample translation available

Petr Borkovec’s inventive, imaginative and totally unique poetry catalogue connects the poetic language of the 19th century, echoes of folk poetry and a wide variety of quotations, loanwords and allusions with the style of expression used by members of modern-day obscure interest groups such as metal-detecting enthusiasts, pet owners, fish fanciers, plant-growers and entomologists, lovers of the outdoors, guns and porn, hunters, dragonfly collectors, criminologists, members of housing associations and poets. Their unique voices form rare exhibits in Borkovec’s collection. Borkovec combines old Czech, the genre of small ads, descriptions of crimes and criminals, pop-song lyrics, old natural-history books and Czech textbooks, fables in the manner of Aesop, bad translations requiring editing, the gutter press in its printed, electronic and televisual forms, and popular advertising journalism. A Herbarium for Something Worse is thus made up of ingenious variations, parodies and cultivated offshoots as well as genetic mutations of well-researched forms of expression.

Petr Borkovec (1970) is a translator and poet, recipient of many awards for his poetry including South Tyrol’s Norbert C Kaser Award and Germany’s Hubert Burda Award. His poems have been published in most European languages including English and German. At the start of the 1990s he began working for the literary review Souvislosti, he has also worked as a newspaper proofreader, the editor of newspaper literary and cultural sections and later as a publishing editor and translator from Russian. He has also translated several ancient and Korean texts into verse. From 2005 to 2023 he organised well-known author reading nights at Prague’s Café Fra.