Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers – The Influential 1976 Poet Laureate Anthology of Translated Poetry

by Charles Simic (Editor)

First published in 1976, this astonishing anthology from two U.S. Poet Laureates, Charles Simic and Mark Strand, compiles a selection of the finest translated literature of the time, showcasing the then-little-known writers who had a profound influence on the current generation of poets.

Genres: Poetry, Writing

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two US Poet Laureates/Pulitzer winners gathered their favorite European & South American poets. Collected poetry is translated from German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Italian, Czech, Serbian, and Hebrew, and gathers well-known names, and many new (to me) international 20th-century poets.

The ones I "knew"/have read, or are currently waiting are in the TBR are shown here:
▫️Julio Cortázar -Argentina
▫️Fernando Pessoa - Portugal
▫️Octavio Paz - Mexico
▫️Yehuda Amichai - Germany/Israel

Others I read the first time here, and promptly looked up/ordered more of their work!
▫️Nicanor Parra - Chile
▫️Czeslaw Milosz - Poland
▫️Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Brazil
▫️Charles Simic - Yugoslavia/US

Anthologies are the *amuse-bouche* of the literary world - little bites here and there to sample the style and tone of multiple writers.

I love the organic nature of following a book or writer mentioned/sampled in another book, and continuing that trail. I've done this for years with bibliographies, end notes, and poetry/essay/short story anthologies, and have found so many good leads this way.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduced me to Ponge, Herbert, Pessoa, Amichai, Celan, Holub, etc. So very important.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

The seventeen poets collected here present the two sides of the international modernist/surrealist movement. These poets’ work is either concerned with creating new myths that explore the world with a fresh surrealist eye or with documenting the historical events that shaped their countries’ histories. Of the former group, Julio Cortazar’s prose poems are the most inventive and inspiring, as they combine the surreal imagery and flat tone of the movement with human themes. His excellent “The Lines of the Hand” (79) is an adventure that illuminates our connectedness as human beings and how the sadness of one can be traced to each of us. Similarly, Nicanor Parra’s contributions place the surreal into terms for the “pilgrim” people (158), and weaves tales of his past with the myths of his culture. A thread also running through this group is a self-consciousness about writing, as exemplified by Yannis Ritsos’ “The Poet’s Place,” which challenges readers to find the poet “hidden among his words” and hopes that through writing, poets will find “forgiveness and sanctity” from the world (203).
The latter group, the historical poets, are less prevalent in this anthology, but are finely represented by both Yehuda Amichai and Czeslaw Milosz. Amichai’s is a poetry of witness, that bares a naked eye on everything from lovers “amputated” from one another to his “dead friends’ faces…covered by nothing” on the battlefield (124). His poems are haunted by the child in him whose “hands…/Remain/Clinging” (123) to a broken past, while trying to create a new future. Milosz is, as the editors proclaim, “one of the major poets of this century” (246), who examines modern life and tries to battle the “indifference” (149) that so many have to the horrible happenings of the 20th century. In “To Robinson Jeffers” (144-145), he blatantly states that it is “Better” to praise nature and history than to “proclaim…an inhuman thing,” as many of the surrealist poets attempt in their poetry.
In the end, I found strengths in both camps of poets introduced to me here.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthologies are always a grab-bag, writers you might be sympathetic to, others you aren't. But this fairly small collection samples from quite a number of "foreign" literatures and comes up mostly on the winning side. I found Henri Michaux particularly interesting, among the writers I'm not really familiar with, and found the selections of Yannis Ritsos--whom I think often quite good--not very interesting at all.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the American poetry scene has got you down, this book is a good refuge. Poems about eggs, math, the weight of clouds and other things. A lot of the translations were so well done I kept flipping to the back of the book to see if the poem had originally been written in English.

[Kallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book (on my 'keeper' shelf) several times. Simic and Strand offer a wonderful introduction to these poets, who are mind-expanding and don't settle for 'beauty.'

[Mii · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great read!

[Daniel Rounds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the most important book of translations I have ever read. This book opened a whole new world of international poetry to me and shaped my reading agenda for almost two decades.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology felt a bit uneven, but the best work floored me.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book changed my life.