The Other Europe

Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Emery George

How many Eastern European poets can you name? Until some months ago I myself could name but three: the Polish and widely-feted Milosz, Szymborska, and Zagajewski. Great poets, surely but hardly representative when it comes to the dazzling multitude of nations, languages, and cultures that comprise this historically rich, politically charged region, a fact made plain to me one evening when I happened upon a copy of this extraordinary anthology in a local bookstore. “Eastern Europe is one half of Europe,” writes the editor, Emery George, in his introduction to the collection. “It is a vast and vital realm of society and culture which, for all the attention lavished on it since World War II, remains for many Americans either that sinister expanse ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or, at best, ‘the old country,’ where tales of Dracula, ethnic grandmothers, and good recipes come from.” 

Offering readers a sampling of the work of no less than 162 contemporary poets, both men and women, from at least fifteen different languages, this volume is astonishing both in its breadth and resonance, stamping the names and homelands of these poets on the cluttered, workaday maps in our brains. Including writers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, as well as former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, editor Emery George also provides a short if illuminating section on Yiddish poets still writing today. Here, from the anthology, is my own brief sampling:

In Chalk Rooms

                                                                 let all the walls

                                                                 about me be green

                                                                 like a whole harvest

                                                                 of summer’s meadows

walls like light

        sliding through green bottle-glass

walls like forest

       moss-grown and damp

walls like mouldy

       cheese on a knife

and walls like frogs

       so cool and loud

walls with gentleness

        like budding leaves

walls of juiciness

        as of chopped turnip tops

walls in that tone

        in which rain soaks moss

and yellowed like cabbage

        butterflies abandoning cocoon

walls hard and green

        corrugated wet

encompassing me

                                                                 as have only woods and waters.

                                                                 but the world listens

                                                                 to me as to a gnat’s song

                                                                 though I suffer terrible

                                                                 famine for greenness

 Aina Kraujiete (Translated by Inara Cedrins)

Father’s Winter

The birds have all left

my father’s tall trees.

Now only frozen stars

cling to the black branches.

Old farm tools stand stagnant:

plows, scythes, hands and hoes.

It seems there is nowhere to go,

nothing to make us wonder.

The wonders of Father’s life

have passed unnoted and expected—

who will marvel at the water or grass,

or write down the spring or winter?

If you listen, at night

you can hear the deep and heavy sighs

of the senile, faithful Guernsey 
passing up from the cattle-shed.

All thoughts, like snow, blend to one.

Justinas Marcinkevičious (Translated by  Irene Pogožzelskyte Suboczewski)

The Early Chaplin

We know the early Chaplin but before him

was an earlier Chaplin   Those films

are already forgotten   Chaplin

had the face of a brute he bared his teeth

like a wildcat readying to spring and had no

scruples he seduced women hired gangsters

to rub out his rivals rejected he sought revenge

by all means fair and foul when the lovely Mabel

Normand was in an auto race this blackguard

wetted down the pavement switched around the signs sending

the car to the precipice planted dynamite despite

everything Mabel survived and won he almost

burst with fury the audience

was bursting with laughter and of course showed

him no sympathy at all   He did not yet have

his dress suit cane mustache   He had

a monocle and goatee   His name was not

Charlie but Chas   This went on

for some time  But in time

his face figure and inner self began to change  This

happens not only to actors but

to apostles and mere mortals   More than one

person has lived through this in his youth wondering

and suffering when his skin

hardened in a grimace which

seemed to be an exact replica

of the inner self when it crumbled and again froze

in another mould    No one knows

how all this happens   This is no

run-of-the mill decision  Maybe inspiration   Thus Chaplin

after making thirty-five films went ahead and

changed from Chas to Charlie   In the last

of these films they both were there Charlie

dreamed of being Chas   From sleep

the loiterer was wakened by the policeman’s stick   He got up

from the park bench and hobbled

into the distance with an embarrassed smile   There was no

anger in him only hope   No craving

for success but a desire

to defend human dignity   From the pursuer

he became the pursued   And this was now

the early Chaplin whom

we came to love without ceasing to laugh

Wiktor Worosylski (Translated by Magnus J. Kryńnski and Robert A. Maguire)

Emory George is the author of sixteen books, including seven of his own poetry and two collections of the work of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.  Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology is published by Oxford University Press.

Peter Adam Nash