Another Republic

Charles Simic &
Mark Strand

Simic and Strand, long before being Pulitzer winner and Poet Laureate of the United States respectively, put together this fine anthology of European and South American poets, doing some of the translation work themselves and drawing most of the big names in poetic translation to work with them. The result is a fine, fine piece of work that, despite is present state of obscurity, deserves a great deal of attention.

As with most anthologies one is likely to find, the actual quality of the work therein is variable. Put beside such legendary greats as Czeslaw Milosz are lesser lights like Francis Ponge, whose stuff oftentimes reads more like stuff Pierre Reverdy left on the floor. But some of those lesser lights are very worth reading (Simic's quest to bring the work of Vasko Popa to the American people continues to this day, deservedly). The translations also vary in quality, but far more slightly; the lesser ones have a jarring word here, a transition that needs re-read there. The quality ranges from stellar to slightly-less-than-stellar.

Not all of the seventeen wordsmiths here (most are poets, but a few pieces are excerpts from novels, e.g. the section from Julio Cortazar) are folks whose work I will go well out of my way to find in the near future, but, again as always with anthologies, one can find a number of pearls amongst the swine. In this case, the number of pears is more than high enough to warrant seeking out this now-obscure book.