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In which you flee to your own horizon: New European Poets
The key point here is what makes the survey indispensable: it deals with recent poetry and it is huge in scale. All translations are frustrating, because they always point to a larger reality which only exists in the original language and in source publications; something of this scale produces so much satisfaction that you don't have the energy to feel more than tiny slivers of frustration. Admittedly it could have been 3000 pages long, but what is on show here is going to keep you happy for a long time.
This is one of those management super-projects which only Americans seem able to bring to fruition.
The wrapper informs us that more than 200 translators were involved. There are about 290 poets here, as well, and the sources vary over ‘more than forty’ languages. This is wonderful to contemplate. It’s sort of like looking at the figures for the bridge which runs between Denmark and southern Sweden. It doesn’t seem possible but, now it has reached my household, I also think it was necessary and that my household is more complete. I was intimidated by seeing a country I’d never heard of, Sapmi. Another glance revealed that this is a name for where the Lapps live, under four governments. Hmmm. Why not call it ‘Lapland’? The Lapp poem is one of the few dubious choices, it has too much Third World naive touristophile exoticism. But the overall design is wonderfully integral.
I've just looked it up in Amazon and it only costs eight pounds eighteen. Unbelievable. It's 400 pages long. Everyone should buy this.
An authoritarian review would take 290 poets and decide that they are really variants on one person and can be addressed as a single phenomenon (in which people who differed were obviously deviant and unimportant). I can't review it in that way and I think it would be easy to exaggerate the overlaps, but there are interesting things I can say about it. It might be more appropriate to write 290 very brief reviews. I am willing to skip this stage if you are. I would rather talk about some missing data objects. For example, if we concede that someone is Byelorussian, from Belarus, then an inevitable step on the way to getting through the sentence is to summon up the meaning of the adjective Byelorussian - if we know what that meaning is. I am of course pointing out that this is a problem. We can use these poems as primary evidence but actually they call for a knowledge of social context which we basically lack. Even if we knew what Belarus was like in 1970, it has clearly changed very much in the intervening years, thus invalidating the knowledge we had in the first place. The idea that you can just happily come to ‘understand a country’ and marry this up with ‘understanding poetry’ is naive, 1950sish, and seems like an idea of male-female relations dating from before the advent of feminism. While a romance of poetry with sociology is possible and may even be fun, my suggestion is that it will seem stupid and cheap when you sober up.
Each of these poems comes from a larger reality which pre-exists it. I would suggest, though, that you can enjoy the translations without possessing that larger reality. There are ten million people in Belarus, it has perhaps the most horrible history in this century of any country, BBC reports suggest that its political life is really screwed up and calling it a democracy would be hopelessly misleading, most Europeans couldn’t find it on a map... but maybe you can ignore all that when reading the seven Belorussian poems here.
Even while renouncing claims to knowledge of most regions of the continent, we can strike back by pointing out how many previous attempts to say anything about ‘European poetry’ have just been making observations, perhaps very well-informed ones, about French or Russian poetry, and then pretending that the rest were just 'imitations with a delay’, provincial cultures which essentially got things wrong. There are no 'Europeanists’, although there are people who can think intelligently about two or even three national cultures. It may well be that our descriptions of periods, the basic building-blocks for statements, apply primarily to the most populous countries and are in fact more applicable to a period in French culture than to ‘European culture’. We might well discuss the term ‘post-modern’ in a review about the past 30 years. In fact, it does not seem like a useful term for the aggregate of poems on show here. This leaves open the possibility either that the team involved in selecting unconsciously rejected post-modern poems which actually existed, or that ‘post modern’ is really an inadequate term for the period (1970-2008 or even 1970-80 only), or even (less probably) that the translation process shaves off the ‘post modern quality’. Another suggestion is that post-modern is a genre and can never occupy more than a few percentage points within the total cultural repertoire, and so to raise it to the level of the characteristic of a whole era was a clear error. The pressure to include many poets militated for short poems, so that more complex poetic structures, which in many cases would also exhibit the contradictions, the parody of master narratives, the defamiliarisation of the relations between ‘history’ and personal experience, which some people call ‘post modern’, were left on the wharf. I can see that the short representation of Bert Papenfuss, to choose someone I have translated quite a bit, elides his structural planning, and that this probably creates an impression of solidity which is deceptive. I think that the term ‘postmodernism’ has meagre explanatory value for poets it might apply to, like Papenfuss or Bastelaere. It’s a tired word.
What occurs to me is more basic: if all 290 poets here are ‘post modern’, and ‘post modern’ is a term we can all understand because we have encountered the classic po-mo texts, then when reading these poems we would essentially encounter provincial variants on an experience we have already had, and this would certainly call into question why we need to read this book at all. What I would like to suggest is that there is a strategy of office holders and metropolitan gatekeepers in which any individual writer either fulfils a ‘person description’ scripted by the gatekeepers, and so when promoted indirectly justifies the prestige of the gatekeepers, or, they do not match the description and so are defined as failing and out of touch - also by the gatekeepers. To sum up, I am glad that Prufer and Williams have avoided the term post modern and I think that while it may yet be a useful term the way it has actually been used by the publishing industry and related fiefdoms is astonishingly mendacious, power-oriented, and manipulative. In its social field of application it keeps close company with hegemony and more or less discreet operations of exclusion and disqualification.
As a corollary, I do not have a view of or even a name for the period we are now living in. This may mean that I am not a proper connoisseur. On the other hand, we can see dozens of separate schools if we have that curiosity. In fact, we could well agree that the sensations associated with ‘postmodernism’ are inevitably present when anyone, including me, looks at this diversity: it is impossible to reduce it to order and secure knowledge, in fact it overspills the limits of memory at every point. The prerequisite for writing effective poetry may be the ability to get away from confusion and make experience cohere: out of an embarrassingly infinite visual plane, you find a section which you frame, which you pull into focus, and where the elements relate to each other as a composition within the frame. It may in fact be that those writing ‘post-modern’ poems have been eliminated because what they write is incoherent and unsatisfactory.
I really like the quality of translations in this volume. This is the golden age of poetry translation, but the world is full of rotten poetry translations, which just make the whole field full of depressing and time-wasting experiences. It’s quite easy to grasp the meaning of a poem very well and be unable to put together a convincing English poem. In fact, translating a poem offers most of the difficulties that writing a poem does. I am not saying crudely that all translations have to be by poets, after all most English or American poets can’t write a good poem in their native language. There is a solution and it has to do with the business arrangements around the project: if you have a sceptical editor, or maybe three, who read a sheaf of offered translations and just throw out the bad ones, you are halfway towards a good result. This is obvious, but anyway this volume was clearly very well managed and a lot of other projects aren’t. It’s an error to commission translations and accept them before you have examined their quality. It’s a mistake to pick on a poet and cling to the decision even if the English texts don’t stand up. In fact, the key factor is how accurate and uncompromised you are about rejecting bad translations. If you are an editor who throws out crap translations you are already a long way to being good at editing.
I suppose the era of Communist translations, where people were appointed to translate into English because they were loyal party members, because they were resident in Moscow (perhaps working for Radio Moscow), because the Party wanted to give you an income, etc., has disappeared. This was truly a source of humiliation for the entire literary world. I suppose the old-style Party-line socialist realists actually deserved nauseatingly crass translations, we can’t even speak of ‘mistranslating’ Kochetov and other hacks, but a nightmare has ended. Those old Commies are probably still trying to get published, you can still find their books second hand, but the sector as a whole has been taken over by east Europeans in exile and by academically trained linguists. There was even a genre of poems translated from Ukrainian (Uzbek, Latvian, etc.) into Russian and re-translated into Communist English by someone who had no idea what the original poem was trying to do. Today we have a cadre of skilled translators and a cadre of alert cultural managers who realise some of the moves needed to protect the quality of the final version, the one which we the public benefit from. This is why Prufer and Miller's anthology is so consistently good.
For my irritating views on translating poetry see: http://www.cipherjournal.com/html/duncan.html
It's very recent poetry, most poets born after 1940. I suppose a real feature of this volume is that generally you can’t get a whole book (in English) by most of the poets, because their careers are not old enough. The full-scale translation logically comes after a period of trials and exploration, since after all a whole volume is a big project. The array of single-poet volumes available is magnificent (and I looked at this for a book I wrote recently on European poetry 1940-70), but it’s better for poets who ‘emerged’ in the 1960s than for ones who emerged in the Eighties. What this means is that this is a pioneering volume. While this raises the risk, it deserves praise as well. You are probably familiar with very few of these poets. Olga Sedakova is someone who has at least three volumes of translation available in English. Checks on the internet show other translations into French. Sedakova evidently has the status of a classic, and if you like her poems you at least have the chance of following up. I think her poetry is wonderful. A volume in English by Ulf Stolterfoht arrived after I began this review. He is more of an avant-garde and system-oriented writer, but apart from translating a lot of his poetry I find it fascinating and dazzling. As I said, very few of these poets have been translated on that scale. Maybe in thirty years' time they will have been.
Take this poem, the first in the book:
To accept the day. What will come.
To pass through more streets than houses,
more people than streets. To pass through
skin to the other side. While I make
and unmake the day. Your heart
sleeps with me. It wraps me up at night
and the mornings are cold when I get up.
And I’m always asking where you are and why
the streets no longer are rivers. At times
a drop of water falls to the ground
as if it were a tear. At times
there isn’t ground enough to soak it up.
This is in fact is Portuguese (by Rosa Alice Branco), and if we showed a film of the streets they would look definitively Portuguese. However, I am wondering if it matters that it is Portuguese and not Byelorussian. If we cannot imagine Portuguese streets, is it not adequate to imagine the streets of the town we live in? Are these words not light and slippery enough to move wherever we want them to go, attracted towards the experience we actually have? It is not relevant to go and research Portuguese town planning in order to read the poem. Pursuing this idea, the poems do not hide behind the national cultures (and whatever objects furnish rooms or streets) and ignorance of those national cultures is not an obstacle, so long as we have more intimate virtues of being able to respond to a poem, to imagine what it shows - and not to worry about what we cannot imagine. These poems do not have the lumbering and burdensome detail which would make them sociological documents - or sales catalogues for furniture or appliances. They do not describe sociological reality any more than they imitate a sales catalogue in respect of the objects. The project of using them to study the sociology of Europe (or of any region) through them seems basically flawed.
Readers in Portugal are probably not using the poems to discover the sociology of Portugal, with which they are perhaps familiar. That sociology is consequently not there in the verse. The way in which people use poems is to lead them out of the daily reality of the place where they live and into something exotic, elevated, enchanted, transcendent, or at least unexpected. In this constellation of events, we are perhaps not handicapped by coming from the wrong country, we perhaps own the vital equipment for finding our way through the poem as soon as we are practised in reading poems - and do not need to spend days looking at photographs of Portuguese houses. We would concede, no doubt, that the social and political arrangements in Belarus are exotic in comparison with the English ones, that social events there would be hard for us to gloss successfully. But this structure may not apply in poetry because the poet has directed much of his or her energy to making a verbal fabric which flies above these problems and which contains its vital meaning quite safely within its own extent. Bearing this in mind, we can look at one of the Byelorussian poems -
creating a homer is less complicated than you might imagine
all you need is exquisite taste and some patience
a pair of scissors there are still countries almost unknown
otherwise there are words with vague meanings enough beautiful names and besides
abundance of archive and forgotten poets
at least a week at max half a century will be needed to montage and live
and to form a circle of incurably blind madmen
that everybody would take for a school on rhodes or klias island
it would be good to keep it all a secret but especially the slogan
homer only gets the best and then everything will work out
(Mikas Bajaryn)
and ask whether it even matters which country it comes from. The suggestion (roughly, that the historical record is faked?) could be attributed to ‘postmodern awareness of the life of the media’ or simply to growing up under a dictatorship where everything was faked. A Croatian poet writes about the idea of history:
the river only moans, with dry lips and slow jerks:
where is that ugly statue of history at all?
I used to have it in my left pocket but it fell out:
I used to have it in my eye, in my ear, in my rotten Converse sneaker,
full of Balkan sweat and cheap European antiperspirants.
where is that wild and endemic high-heeled shoe Europe at all?
in the north, west, east and south and in between.
wherever I am alone: I reflect in the mirrors,
in the multicoloured silence of my own musical memory
which does not let me speak. Just as it does not any foreigner.
(Branko Cegec)
‘Wild and endemic’ are adjectives suitable for flowers, and ‘endemic’ means a plant found only in one geographical region; perhaps Croatian history cannot be understood outside Croatia. The poet is saying that the contents of memory are such an overload that they make speech impossible. This is of course a way of speaking about history, but the poem also suggests that most poetry is not speaking about history, that the ability to read history depends on an artificial range of signs and that if you look at all the signs you then can’t fold them back into any story that can be told.
There is a very interesting introduction about the history of Europe since 1970. I have some doubts about this, although I think that it’s good to fight for such a narrative to be written. Did the EEC/Common Market create the prosperity of western Europe? It was stuffed with rich countries but the economic growth of 1945-75 (especially) was not simply caused by the EEC (started up in 1958) and there is a whole argument about whether the EEC caused this wealth or just redistributed it to French farmers (mostly). The statement that peripheral nationalism got going in the 1970s is very odd, although the development into terrorism was a feature of that decade. It obviously isn’t true that no one was in prison for political violence in Ulster in 1970. The dating needs to be adjusted a bit, and surely the optimism of minority nationalities (e.g. in Ulster and the Basque Country) was inspired by decolonisation, which peaked well before 1970 and arguably even in 1946-50. The real upsurge of nationalist feeling in the 1970s was not in the Atlantic periphery but in the East, where the decay of communism led to a boom in nationalism and religion. This is a rewarding introduction. It says almost nothing about literary fashions, but this is a strength. It misses the Left upsurge, of 1968-75 roughly, (because it seems out of date?) and the wave of the New Right or neo-conservatism (because it is too repulsive?). Surely these were big things in history.
It is tempting to ask how representative the selection is for the total poetic life of each separate country. I am convinced that this is a red herring. Far more importunate is whether the book is actually readable, as a mass of English texts. At this level, the book works incredibly well. I find the notion of ‘representative’ excessively difficult. You might not want to know about literary life - a seething mass of rivalries, of rumours, of gushing propaganda, brilliant character assassinations, the poverty of the dedicated and nonconformist, the power of weaselly fixers and backhanders. The poems are the payload. A few remarks may pay their way. I looked at the Welsh section - two poems. No possibility here of working out that there has been a huge argument over the past 30 years about the traditional forms (of cynghanedd), about free versions of the inherited forms, and free, ornamentless, verse. No trace of the formal Renaissance (Dadeni) of the 1970s. I happen to know about that (in an unplanned way I have spent a lot of time reading in Welsh over the last three years) and I can conjecture that artistic (or art-political?) rows have taken place in other countries and equally fail to register in this volume. In German, another poetry world I have some familiarity with, I am really impressed by the selection of poets. Kling, Draesner, Papenfuss, Stolterfoht, Seiler, they’re all there. I am pleased to say that out of five Dutch poets included I have actually translated two (with help, naturally). I can’t believe that Dirk van Bastelaere does not appear. I think this would surprise Dirk a great deal. So, OK, there is a whole realm of poets not featured here. But surely the point of an excellent book such as this one is that it raises people’s interest and they are likely to go on to read more European poetry. The story is never over.
One point of interest is the use of rhyme and regular metre in eastern European countries (mainly). Obviously rhyme has not disappeared east of the Elbe in the way it has in the West (in the core EEC countries?). Obviously, too, many poets in the east have abandoned the inherited devices and write in vers libre. It’s interesting that the life of rhythms overflows the boundaries of individual languages (and their local sounds). It would be nice to know about this. But, after all, the main interest of this area of knowledge is to explode the deluded yibble of western conservatives who claim that eastern European poetry is more significant because of its solid adherence to the legacy, and that this is the destiny for western poetry which is in deep disarray. The people who argue this generally don’t know any of the languages in which East European poets write. Still, this is just an argument and it is quite benign to side-step it. We don’t hear the literary propaganda of other countries and so fortunately we don’t need to have someone less corrupt guide us through it to something more authentic.
It is emotional to read about a style such as the Baroque, and to see how it fanned out over most of Europe, how it owned its era and how something unnameable and obscurely powerful drew an end to it. This is just too seductive, I’m afraid. The period covered here, say 1970 to 2005, has no unified period name and seems unlikely to earn one. Part of the problem is that it covers too much of Europe - the forty languages the editors mention. If we subdivide that overgrown lump into parts, say southern Europe, the Warsaw Pact, the West, the Protestant North, the tests all become easier to pass, and quite a few interesting profiles would emerge. There is a book by Andreas Angyel called Slavische Barockwelt, the Slavic baroque, and it is a quite extraordinary thing. East central Europe had a land-owning class at that time which was Catholic and quite willing to accept Italian noble tastes as definitive. However, on importing the styles, at vast expense, they also wanted to take them further. Their baroque was more baroque. I found the geography of all that endlessly interesting. However, the landowners were quite few in number, a few thousand families really, and there was a structural imperative which made them keen to display wealth in a way which other members of their class would recognise. This was the basis for a style spreading all over Catholic Europe (actually the French said no). In the 20th C there was no such basis, and the several millions of culturally active people were not as homogeneous. Style history could not be so simple again. Actually, the communist rulers of eastern Europe did constitute a conformist international super-rich art-patronising aristocracy, but they dominated the era only in a quantitative sense. There is not much trace of their literary taste in this volume.
We could postulate the unifying theme of the era as being the cultural rejection of dictatorship, with poets in their hundreds passionately making their choice in favour of Freedom and minuting their decision in deathless verse. Part of the problem with this is that it goes through a long journey to bring us a piece of knowledge that we already had at the beginning - viz. that Communism is Bad. Part of it, too, is that the poets who rejected Communism as their system of government didn’t simply write about how bad communism was, that their audiences were not unfamiliar with this notion, and that attacks on communism just weren’t a major theme of poetry. Part, too, is that this concept would bring poetry to a dead halt when the dictatorships in eastern Europe resigned from their posts at the end of the eighties. The context is one of Western ‘experts’ who had connections (more or less occulted) with the defence establishment, and who simultaneously wanted to recover knowledge of how Communist society worked (as a basis for political warfare) and to make contact with indigenous anti-communists who could be used to undermine the government. Poets who were not documentarists or anti-Red spokesmen just weren’t on the shopping list. Some confession and repentance has to be publicly heard here. The world of slavistics in the West was thoroughly penetrated by the needs of the defence establishment (chucking hundreds of students and fat fees at the Slavistics departments, always) as well as by western Marxists, with their own burden of lies and complicity. However much help the anti-communist network (not all funded by the CIA) gave to Russian and other eastern poetry-writing émigrés, at the basic level of translating them and giving them jobs (broadcasting anti-red propaganda?), the process accumulated resentment in almost all the people who benefited from it. Their handlers either hated eastern Europeans as The Enemy or couldn’t care less about poetry, and in that state being handled was just degrading. I see I have left out the rest of the dictatorships - happily in charge of various prisons and torture chambers in Spain, Portugal and Greece in 1970. While the Greek one possibly inspired more poetry, just because it was new, none of those three regimes have left any trace in the poems collected here. While it is quite possible that none of the poets on show here is in favour of dictatorships, the pro-democracy theme is not a big feature - and elevating it to the high office of Theme of the Era would instantly exclude 90% of the poets at work. This failed test is probably decisive.
There is a dialectic which implies that, when you write about the criminality of the powerful, the energy in your poems is their energy, and the greater their crimes are the more arresting and imperative your poems are. If we apply this Europe-wide, it turns out that poems not about genocide are less important and that if you are just writing about loss of civil liberty and not mass violence of the State your poems are less significant. Further, with the disappearance of communism the poems of anti-communism lose their fuel tanks. This whole area needs more exploration, but I think there is a whole diocese of bad taste here. To reiterate, few of these poems talk about the Party and the dictatorships. Surely it is more interesting to read about how life is led, how freedom is exercised, how the aesthetic dimension reveals the real nature of human beings and so their true destiny.
 
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