Shadows on the shoji Book

The anthology Contemporary East European Poetry, edited by Emery George, first appeared in 1983 from Ardis and then was reprinted, with a few new poems, by Oxford University Press in 1993. The book aimed to represent what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, in the countries under Communism, whose cultural output was little known in the West. All of the poetry here is presented in English versions by a team of translators, and the original-language text is not included.

However, the anthology did not extend to the Soviet Union. No Russian poetry is included, which is a bit of a shock. I had been led to this anthology by a misunderstanding that it contained some poems by Gennady Aigi, whose native Chuvashia and adopted Moscow are well within the bounds of geographical Europe, but alas no. Ditto for Ukrainian or Belorussian verse. However, the anthology also includes German poetry from East Germany, which one might not have expected.

Of course two decades on, one cannot expect anything here to still be "contemporary". Even by the time of the 1983 first printing (and even more so by the 1993 reprinting), several of the poets had been dead for some time already. However, lovers of poetry will discover many great figures of 20th-century literature, from the Estonian poet Marie Under to the keeper of the Yiddish flame Moshe Yungman. The poems by Romanian poet Nina Cassian are from before her exile in the United States for falling afoul of Ceausescu; her later poetry is perhaps better known in the West, but here you can see how she started off.

I might grumble a bit about the translations -- the Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres is particularly ill-served here compared to the accurate and memorable English renderings of his eternal moment anthology. However, this book remains quite helpful.