Into The Heart Of European Poetry

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

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.

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.

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.

From the Blurb: The last century and a quarter has been one of the most fertile periods for poetry in Europe and there has been a corresponding increase in interest among English-speaking readers. Although the debate about whether poetry is translatable continues, John Pilling believes that this growing readership is evidence of a substratum present in every poetic utterance which enables it to survive and withstand translation. Indeed, it would be a remarkable linguist who could tackle all the writers included here in their original language, and it would be an enormous loss to refuse to do otherwise. Apart from the five main European tongues-French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian-the study includes poets writing in Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Polish and Greek. The book opens with a consideration of the great French poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, who must be the starting point of any survey of modern European poetry. The author goes on to consider the brilliant generation of Russians writing before and during the Revolution-Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky. He does not, however, neglect the more diverse strands in the rest of Europe including, for the purposes of this study, the important work being done in Spanish America by Paz, Neruda and Borges. For each poet the author gives a brief outline of his or her life and major publications, then a more detailed consideration of their poetic oeuvre, placing it in its context. There is also a very detailed and extensive bibliography. The book is aimed at the non-specific reader who wants a straightforward guide to a diverse and very rich area of contemporary writing. Above all it is intended to encourage the reader to return to, or discover for the first time, the poetry itself.