Into the Heart of European Poetry

Description

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... Read more

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 as indispensable as it is engaging.

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France; Exalting What Is (Jacques Réda); Spain; The Chromatic Prose of Josep Pla’s Gray Notebook; The Pursuit of Shimmering Instants (Luis Cernuda); A Spanish Penelope (Francisca Aguirre); Italy; Haunting Absence, Intense Presence (Eugenio Montale); Songs of a Life (Umberto Saba); Childhood as Sacrifice and Annihilation (Alberto Savinio); A Dark Degree of Suffering: Livia Svevo’s Memoir of Her Husband; The Solitude of a Master Empathizer (Cesare Pavese); Appearance, Apparition, Aspiration (Giorgio Caproni and Giuseppe Ungaretti); A Cornucopia of Italian Poetry (Camillo Sbarbaro, Vittorio Sereni, Andrea Zanzotto, Luciano Erba, Bartolo Cattafi, Lucio Mariani, Luigi Fontanella); Between the Horizon and the Leap (Alfredo de Palchi); A Quest for Continuity and Communion (Mario Luzi); The Nexus of Contradictory Verities (Roberto Bertoldo); Unresolved Betweenness (Milo De Angelis); How We Would Live (Giovanna Sicari); Slovenia; A Generous and Courageous Lucidity (Edvard Kocbek); A Much Delayed Letter from Ljubljana (Veno Taufer, Aleš Debeljak, and others); Bosnia and Herzegovina; A Letter from Sarajevo (Miljenko Jergovic, Vidosav Stevanovic, Aleksandar Hemon, Velibor Colic, and Svetislav Basara); Serbia; Pleasure and the Deeper Ambivalence (Radmila Lazi?); Greece; Intricacies of Exile (Georgios Vizyenos); Invoking Saint Alexandros Papadiamantis; A Bayeux Tapestry à la grecque (Stratis Myrivilis); The Innate Passion and the Apotheosis (Odysseus Elytis); From Sorrow to Celebration (Andonis Decavalles); A Chromatic, Obsessional Poetics (Miltos Sachtouris); Erotic Knowledge, Self-Knowledge (Dinos Christianopoulos); Poetry, Anti-Poetry, and Disgust (Elias Petropoulos); The Mentor of Pyrgos (Elias Papadimitrakopoulos); Eros and Other Spiritual Adventures (Veroniki Dalakoura); Bulgaria; My Life as Someone Else’s [Kapha Kassabova); Hungary; Milk Teeth Biting Granite (Attila József); The No-Man’s Land of the Nameless (Ágnes Nemes Nagy); Holding Hungary’s Broken Peony (Sándor Csoóri); Good-Bye Mother (Péter Esterházy); German-Speaking Countries; Dark Struggles for a Utopia of Language (Ingeborg Bachmann); In Search of Presence (Peter Handke); The Poetry of Thomas Bernhard; Intriguing Specimens of Humanity (Veza Canetti); A Delicate Touch (Peter Altenberg); The Fertile “Crisis Years” of Rainer Maria Rilke; And How Hope is Violent (Paul Celan); Seeking the Self, Seeking Beyond the Self (Hans W. Cohn); A Radical Path to the Ordinary (Elke Erb); A Noble Brightness (Peter Huchel); The Poetry of W. G. Sebald; Facing Up to Unspeakableness (Robert Walser); A French-Judeo-Spanish-Polish Interlude; Idioms of Remembering (Marcel Cohen and Michal Glowinski); Poland; Questions of Fulfillment (Czeslaw Milosz); Metaphysics and Lyric Factors (Piotr Sommer, Krzysztof Kamil Baczy?ski, Tadeusz Rózewicz, and others); Brief Crystallizations of Plenitude (Adam Zagajewski); Searching for the Materia Prima (Marzanna Kielar); Russia and the Former Soviet Union; Anna Akhmatova and Her Magic Choir (Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman, Evgeny Rein); On the Ledge (Joseph Brodsky); Subjective Realism and Lyrical Urgency (Tatiana Shcherbina); Estonia; Of Home and Hereness (Jaan Kaplinski); Peeling Back the Veneer (Jaan Kross); Finland; Finnish Poets and their Greek Dichotomies (Pentti Saarikoski, Tua Forsström, Paavo Haavikko, and others); Norway; A Poetry of Acceptance (Rolf Jacobsen); The Netherlands; Discovering “The Dutch Fiftiers”; Back to France; A French Stage Costume for the Matter of Britain: Florence Delay and Jacques Roubaud’s Graal Théâtre; The Gold of Ripe Fruit (Yves Bonnefoy)

Author(s)

Biography

John Taylor

Into the Heart of European Poetry

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Author(s)

Biography

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