The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris

Before starting my review of this book, I must admit that I've read very little international poetry, with the exception of a few collections of international love poetry in Bulgarian. Those were excellent but it is difficult to compare them with this collection, which covers not just classic European poems of the 20th century but also includes many other poems from around the world. Ilya Kaminsky has done an excellent job in choosing a variety of poems and the book's co-editor, Susan Harris, editorial director of Worlds Without Borders, has been instrumental in dealing with permissions, copyrights and other such issues. Kaminsky notes the scarcity of quality translations of African and Asian poems as well as poems by women and I think that he is to be commended for his attitude. However, despite the difficulties encountered, I think that he and Harris have managed to create an amazingly diverse collection that has something to offer to all lovers of poetry.

The poems are arranged in chronological order from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. The book includes famous authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Constantine P. Cavafy, Anna Akhmatove and Paul Celan but also less well-known poets from around the world such as Anna Kamienska, Henrik Nordbrandt and Dunya Mikhail.

The book includes many excellent pieces so it is difficult to choose which ones to share with you. However, one of my absolute favourites from the collection is Yehuda Amichai's A Man in His Life. I'll include just a few lines to give you some sense of the poem:

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have season enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forigve and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch (1)

Before reading this book my experience of Jewish poetry was limited to Marc Chagall's works, which are very interesting but also, as far as I can recall, peculiarly Jewish so it takes some effort to fully appreciate them. However, Amichai's poem, which is inspired by the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, expresses something that I think we can all relate to it and the imagery that it uses is very potent.

I also very much enjoyed the poems of Adonis, one of the most famous poets writing in Arabic today, whom I had only heard of before. I include here a few lines from his work The Desert: The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982:

My era tells me bluntly:
You do not belong.
I answer bluntly;
I do not belong,
I try to understand you.
Now I am a shadow
Lost in the desert
And shelter in the tent of a skull.

Translated from the Arabic by Abdullah al-Udhari

As I have already mentioned, one of the most remarkable things about this collection is that it introduced me to some amazing but little known poets from all over the world, as well as to works by famous poets that I'd meant to read for a long time. There are many excellent poems in this collection, some of which I found it easier to relate to, in particular the works by East European poets, as I have greater knowledge of the cultures of the authors. However, I also enjoyed works by authors far removed from my own cultural milieu. 

Kaminsky clearly states that what he seeks to do is to expose people to the varied and rich traditions of 20th century poetry. In this respect the collection is an absolute success as it it manages to represent a multiplicity of international voices from different artistic movements - futurism, surrealism, Acmeism, etc. I heartily recommend that you purchase this book so that you can broaden your cultural horizons and experience at least some of the excellent poetry from all over the world that the 20th century has left us as its legacy.

References 
(1) Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris (editors), The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, Ecco: New York, 2010, pp. 283-4
(2) Kaminsky and Harris (editors), Ecco Anthology, p. 315