Something Indecent is intended as a kind of symposium on European
poetry. Seven contemporary Eastern European poets--Adam Zagajewski, Vera
Pavlova, Tomaz Salamun, Ales Steger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus
Alisanka, and editor Valzhyna Mort--introduce us to poems by writers who
have become for them windows onto the world. They were asked: Who are
the best representative poets of your region? Your generation? And, more
broadly: Who are your favorite European poets of the 20th century? What
European poets, across the millennia, are most important to an
understanding of your particular region? Spanning thousands of years and
thousands of miles, their surprising, often unpredictable choices--and
the reasons for those choices--are collected here, forming the latest
entry in a poetic conversation carried across centuries, countries, and
traditions. More than a presentation of contemporary Eastern European
poets, Something Indecent is a conversation about how European poets
view themselves, their contemporaries, their century, and the place of
their region in the millennia.
Includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Brodsky,
Catullus, Paul Celan, John Donne, Zbigniew Herbert, Nâzim Hikmet,
Antonio Machado, Czeslaw Milosz, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Tomaz Salamun, Sappho, Anna Swir, Wislawa Szymborska, Georg
Trakl, Tomas Tranströmer, César Vallejo, Paul Valéry, and many others.
