A Readers Guide To Fifty Modern European Poets

From the Blurb: The last century and a quarter has been one of the most fertile periods for poetry in Europe and there has been a corresponding increase in interest among English-speaking readers. Although the debate about whether poetry is translatable continues, John Pilling believes that this growing readership is evidence of a substratum present in every poetic utterance which enables it to survive and withstand translation. Indeed, it would be a remarkable linguist who could tackle all the writers included here in their original language, and it would be an enormous loss to refuse to do otherwise. Apart from the five main European tongues-French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian-the study includes poets writing in Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Polish and Greek. The book opens with a consideration of the great French poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, who must be the starting point of any survey of modern European poetry. The author goes on to consider the brilliant generation of Russians writing before and during the Revolution-Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky. He does not, however, neglect the more diverse strands in the rest of Europe including, for the purposes of this study, the important work being done in Spanish America by Paz, Neruda and Borges. For each poet the author gives a brief outline of his or her life and major publications, then a more detailed consideration of their poetic oeuvre, placing it in its context. There is also a very detailed and extensive bibliography. The book is aimed at the non-specific reader who wants a straightforward guide to a diverse and very rich area of contemporary writing. Above all it is intended to encourage the reader to return to, or discover for the first time, the poetry itself.