A Little Tour Through European Poetry

This book is both a sequel to author John Taylor's earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and something different. It is a sequel because this volume expands upon the base of the previous book to include many more European poets. It is different in that it is framed by stories in which the author juxtaposes his personal experiences involving European poetry or European poets as he travels through different countries where the poets have lived or worked. Taylor explores poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal, all of which were missing in the previous gathering, analyzes heady verse written in Galician, and presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic. His tour through European poetry also adds discoveries from countries whose languages he reads fluently-Italy, Germany (and German-speaking Switzerland), Greece, and France. Taylor's model is Valery Larbaud, to whom his criticism, with its liveliness and analytical clarity, is often compared. Readers will enjoy a renewed dialogue with European poetry, especially in an age when translations are rarely reviewed, present in literary journals, or studied in schools. This book, along with Into the Heart of European Poetry, motivates a dialogue by bringing foreign poetry out of the specialized confines of foreign language departments.

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia.While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the thing-in-itself, metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia.Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is a

An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry’ s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women’s essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

In volume 1 of Trafika Europe, Andrew Singer gathers choice offerings from the first year of the quarterly journal of the same name. These fourteen selections—from seven women and seven men, seven poets and seven fiction writers—represent languages across the Continent, from Shetland Scots and Occitan, Latvian and Polish, Armenian, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Slovenian to Faroese and Icelandic. With some of the most accomplished writing in new translation from Europe today, this volume opens a window onto some emerging contours of European identity. Former ASCAP director of photography Mark Chester complements the writing with sumptuous black-and-white photos. The contributors are Vincenzo Bagnoli, Ewa Chrusciel, Christine DeLuca, Mandy Haggith, Stefanie Kremser, Aurélia Lassaque, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jóanes Nielsen, Edvīns Raups, László Sárközi, Marko Sosič, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Nara Vardanyan, and Māra Zālīte.

Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey's Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.

An anthology featuring 160 poets writing in 15 languages. By the standards of Western Europe, the subjects are heavy on social and political issues, which only reflects the difference between the two Europes.

Poetry. Women's Studies. Translated from the Italian by Emanuel di Pasquale. Preface by John Taylor. Indian ink drawings by Alberto Cini. Claudia Zironi turns the tables on male writers with her poetic reminiscences of former boyfriends and lovers. Her tone by turns is bemused, angry and grateful, and sometimes revelatory. Her style is sharp, spare and paradoxical. Emanuel di Pasquale was born in Ragusa, Sicily, and emigrated to America in 1957. His translations from Italian include The Journey Ends Here by Carlo della Corte (Gradiva, 2000), Sharing A Trip by Silvio Ramat (Bordighera Press, 2001) and Wings: Selected Poetry 2000- 2005 by Franco Buffoni (Chelsea Editions, 2008). He has published many books of his own poetry, the latest being Knowing the Moment (Blast Press, 2015). In 2012 Xenos Books published his co- translation with Bruno Alemanni of Dante's La Vita Nuova. He lives by the ocean in Long Branch, New Jersey. John Taylor, author of the preface, is an American writer, critic and translator who lives in France. Xenos Books has published two of his books, THE APOCALYPSE TAPESTRIES (2004) and Now the Summer Came to Pass (e-book, 2012). He is a noted translator of French, modern Greek and Italian poetry. His most recent from Italian is Lorenzo Calogero, ORCHID SHINING IN THE HAND: SELECTED POEMS 1932-1960 (Chelsea Editions, 2015). His critical essays on European poetry and French literature have appeared in five volumes with Transaction Publishers, the latest of which is A Little Tour Through European Poetry (2014).

Elias Petropoulos was the most controversial Greek writer of the twentieth century. Imprisoned three times during the Junta (1967-1974) and persecuted by Greek judges as late as the 1980s, this poet and "urban folklorist" produced a vast and groundbreaking oeuvre that continues to provoke extreme reactions from readers. Wielding his precise and provocative style on subject matter ranging from prison life, rebetika music, gay slang, traditional food and public hygiene, to the sociology of brothels, newspaper stands, moustaches, canes and gravestones, Petropoulos aggressively and rigorously challenged the narrow ways in which Greek culture was perceived.After arriving in Paris from the island of Samos in 1977, the American writer, critic and translator John Taylor tacked up a want ad in a Greek bookshop because he was seeking a collaborator for a translation project. Petropoulos, who emigrated to France in 1975, answered the want ad, and thus began a close working relationship that lasted until the author's death in 2003. This insider's portrait features translated excerpts of Petropoulos's writings, and discusses his ideas and methodology, woven together with touching reminiscences and observations about the man behind the sulphurous reputation. It is the first book to appear in English that deals so thoroughly and poetically with this enfant terrible of Modern Greek letters.