A Little Tour through European Poetry

299 Pages·2014·1.388 MB·English

by  John Taylor

Copyright © 2015 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick,
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ISBN: 978-1-4128-5483-2
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Contents
Preface vii
1 On the Strassenbahn with Klaus Merz’s Poetry 1
2 Friedrich Hölderlin, Our Contemporary 9
3 German Poetry beyond Rilke, Benn, and Brecht 17
4 The Unexpected Compassion of Gottfried Benn 25
5 Reading Contemporary Poetry in Weimar 31
6 Translating Swiss Poetry in Looren 37
7 The Italian Poets Are Coming! 45
8 Meeting up with Lorenzo Calogero in Florence 55
9 “Guardami, dimmi, è così per te”: Alfredo de Palchi 63
10 Sandro Penna’s Secret Poems 69
11 The Dark of Love: Patrizia Cavalli 77
12 Poetic Ljubljana 85
13 Edvard Kocbek, Emmanuel Mounier,
the French Review Esprit, and Personalism 93
14 Questions of Daily Life and Beyond: Milan Djordjević 103
15 The Tiger Is the World: Tomislav Marijan Bilosnić 109
16 The Unshackling of Albanian Poetry 113
17 Standing by Pointlessness: Kiki Dimoula 121
18 M anolis Xexakis’s Captain Super Priovolos:
Notes for an Exegesis 129
19 A Panorama of Turkish Love Poetry:
Birhan Keskin and Other Contemporary Women Poets 139
20 The Seventh Gesture: Tsvetanka Elenvoka 147
21 The Wonder-like Lightning of Prose Poetry 149
22 Love According to Luca 157
23 Discovering Benjamin Fondane 165
24 The Desire to Affirm: George Szirtes 173
25 Prague as a Poem: Vítězslav Nezval and Emil Hakl 181
26 A Rather Late Letter from Wrocław 189
27 Th e Self and Its Selves: A Journey through Poetic
Northern Climes 205
28 The Russian Poets Are Coming! 213
29 Th e Five Angles of the Golden Rectangle:
Tomas Venclova 221
30 Telling Dichotomies: María do Cebreiro and Kristiina Ehin 229
31 The Metaphysics of the Kiss: Vicente Aleixandre 235
32 A Spanish Metaphysical Poet Searching for Songs
of Truth: José Ángel Valente 241
33 The Passion and the Patience of Eugénio de Andrade 247
34 The Past Hour, the Present Hour: Yves Bonnefoy 255
Notes 261
Bibliography 271
Index 283
Preface
This book is both a sequel to Into the Heart of European Poetry (2008)
and something different. It is a sequel because I have written about
many more European poets who were not covered in that earlier book
and, especially, about poets from countries that I had not yet featured.
Here I explore poetry in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania,
Albania, Portugal, and Romania, countries that were all missing in
the previous gathering; analyze María do Cebreiro’s heady verse writ-
ten in Galician; and even present an important poet, Gennady Avgi,
who was born in the Chuvash Republic. (The borders of my poetic
Europe extend beyond those of the European Union, which is why I
have also added a chapter about Turkish women poets.) This is not to
say that, with these two books, I have been systematically “Balzacian”:
the author of The Lily in the Valley aspired, yet failed, to set a novel or
at least a story in every département of France. I, too, have a few coun-
tries and languages left to visit. I have followed up on tips and whims
and many premeditated choices. Chance has also played its role: some
books and poets have crossed my path, and others have not—or have
not yet. For example, out of the blue one day, via a new translation,
arrived the Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre, whom I knew about of
course—he won the Nobel Prize in 1977—but whom I had never read.
The day he showed up was a propitious one for meditating on his
“metaphysics of the kiss.” By the way, several of the poets featured
here focus on love, sexuality, and amorous attraction.
This is a collection of essays about European (non-English-writing)
poets. Yet I have bent my rules to include that very English poet, George
Szirtes, who is of Hungarian origin. Why Szirtes, besides the obvious
intellectual pleasures and challenges that his poetry offers? Because he
often deals with essential European themes; because his writing in a
“second language”—albeit, in his case, learned quite young, after tragic
circumstances—is a typical European phenomenon; and because he is a
skilled translator of Hungarian verse. His versions of Ágnes Nemes Nagy
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A Little Tour through European Poetry
were, in fact, amply considered in Into the Heart of European Poetry. As
before, I have added some of my new enthusiasms from countries—Italy,
Germany (and German-speaking Switzerland), as well as Greece—in
which I can read the languages fluently. Rather like Szirtes, the Roma-
nian francophone poet Ghérasim Luca—for whom French was a second
language—is also included here, as is his “double-compatriot” Benjamin
Fondane. If, besides these pieces on Luca and Fondane, only one other
article deals with Francophone poets (from Switzerland, once again)
and only a second one presents a French poet, Yves Bonnefoy (although
several other French poets or writers are mentioned here and there), this
is because French-writing authors fill out the three volumes of Paths to
Contemporary French Literature—with a fourth tome in preparation.
What I write here about Bonnefoy—whose poetry is more analytically
discussed in my other books—is a memory of an afternoon spent with
him in Angers, the French town where I have lived since 1987. Yet the
article also conjures up his recent book, L’Heure présente.
The juxtaposition of a personal experience involving European
poetry or a European poet is what often makes this book different from
Into the Heart of European Poetry. Work and pleasure have enabled
me to travel much more than usual during the past few years. I have
taken advantage of stays in foreign towns to investigate in situ the
poetry written there. Several essays thus evoke the stimulation of read-
ing European poetry and then looking at some of the same sights that
are mentioned in the poems—or at different sights. My model in this
regard has been Valery Larbaud. I sometimes travel with his Oeuvres
(in the Pléiade edition of 1958) in my bag, or with the French transla-
tion of his essays on Spanish literature (Du Navire d’argent), or with
his Journal. And even when I don’t, he is never far from my thoughts.
For familial reasons, I often spend time in Aix-les-Bains, a hot-springs
town located at the foothills of the French Alps. Whenever I do, I drive
at least once during my stay the fifteen-odd miles down the road to
linger in Challes-les-Eaux, where Larbaud would “take his waters.”
Similar pilgrimages are described here, notably to Hölderlin’s
Tübingen and Goethe’s Weimar (where I ended up reading, rather
improbably, one contemporary French and two contemporary German
poets), as well as to Ljubljana, a town for which I have developed a
particular fondness because of its setting, its architecture, and, above
all, its poets. Moreover, because I am also a translator, I have digressed
about an invigorating stay at the Looren Translation House, near Zürich,
where I polished my versions of Philippe Jaccottet. Indeed, it was at
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Preface
Looren that I became acquainted with the work of such Swiss poets as
José-Flore Tappy, Anne Perrier, Pierre Chappuis, Frédéric Wandelère,
Pierre-Alain Tâche, and Pierre Voélin, not to mention the novelist Cath-
erine Colomb. In a small European country, you sometimes open a door
and discover a hidden poetic continent. Another essay here introduces
the Italian poet whom I am currently translating, Lorenzo Calogero.
Normally, I should have met up with him in Calabria, but it was in Flor-
ence that I encountered him, some fifty-one years after his death. The
order of the essays traces out A Little Tour through European Poetry.
What distinguishes continental European poetry from American
and, on sundry levels, English-language poetry in general? In the
introduction to their pioneering anthology, New European Poets (2008),
Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer recall the postwar period and compare
European surrealism and the poetry of witness to American confes-
sional verse. After noting these respective propensities, they describe
the historical and political evolution of Europe since the 1960s, evoking
the impact of the Cold War on poets growing up in the period. Euro-
peans certainly share a common geography, an oft-tragic history, and,
increasingly, transnational political problems of all kinds. To these com-
mon denominators, whose traces one can try to spot in the otherwise
oft-disparate poetries written in the forty-odd European languages, I
would add the multifarious European philosophical heritage and of
course the import of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, but
also Islam, not to mention rationalism and atheism. As the Montenegro
poet Pavle Goranović wittily puts it in a poem included in New Euro-
pean Poets, Europeans are “contemporaries of Martin Heidegger” in
ways that Americans cannot entirely be.
Finally, I have long observed that European poets entertain a differ-
ent relationship with the aesthetics of style and the history of literary
forms, though by stating this I am once again essentially contrasting
them to Americans. This relationship is often exceedingly precise, yet
nonpragmatic. Let me reiterate what I specified in Into the Heart of
European Poetry: European poets
each remain in a dynamic individual confrontation with an oft-ancient
linguistic, stylistic, and literary heritage that may well . . . resemble
only slightly our own Anglo-American literary inheritance, not to
mention the particular qualities and limitations of our language.
Rhyme, meter, word order, and diction, let alone clarity, complex-
ity, and poetic beauty, are perceived differently from language to
language, from literary history to literary history.
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