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 poet, novelist and translator. He has worked as an editor for Lidové Noviny Publishers, Lidové noviny, Literární noviny, and the review Souvislosti. From 2005 to 2023 he was the dramaturge and host of the Prague literary café Fra. He writes regular pieces for the radio station Vltava, the magazines A2 and Qartál, and the online literary journal iLiteratura. He teaches at the Department of Creative Writing of the Academy of Creative Communication. He is a regular contributor to the review Listy. Borkovec made his debut in 1990 with the poetry collection Silent Table Settings (Pražská imaginace). His most recent books to date are the prose volume Cécile and the Others (Fra) and the children’s book Dictations (with Andrea Tachezy; běžíliška). The Baobab publishing house is preparing a poetry collection entitled Little Boats for publication in 2026. Borkovec has translated Russian poets including Vladislav Khodasevich, Vladimir Nabokov, Yevgeny Rein, Joseph Brodsky, and Yuri Odarchenko. Together with the linguist Matyáš Havrda, he has worked on translations of the ancient tragedians: they have jointly translated Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ The Bacchae, and Euripides’ Medea. In 2027, a new translation of Sophocles’ Antigone will premiere at the National Theatre. Borkovec has published books in Great Britain, Italy, France, Slovenia and Romania, though mainly in Germany and Austria. Almost all of his poetry and prose has been published in German, and Borkovec received the Austrian Norbert C. Kaser Prize (2001), the German Hubert Burda Prize (2001), and the Dresden Poetry Prize (2024).