Bilingual poetry volume collects work of 65 wordsmiths

Great poetry anthologies are rare, but not for a lack of great poems. Any sampling of poets is only as strong as the sum of its parts, but, to be more than just a grouping of varied talents, a poetry anthology must also be a work of selective criticism. Complete inclusiveness is a near-impossibility, so editors usually define the parameters of their collection narrowly and, in so doing, attempt to stamp a theoretic label on a particular era or group of poets.

Up the Devil's Back, a bilingual anthology of 20th-century Czech poetry just hitting Prague bookstore shelves, is one of the more successful recent examples of such attempts at being definitive.

Two Slavic literary scholars, Clarice Cloutier, who teaches at Charles University, and Bronislava Volková, who graduated from Charles University and now teaches at Indiana University in the United States, recently undertook the monumental task of selecting and translating the work of 65 Czech poets and giving such eclectic diversity a sense of unity. Their selections are varied, spanning generations and styles, from the formal, Romantic verse of Antonín Sova (1864-1928) to the frank, stripped-down language of contemporary poets like Martin Reiner (born in 1964).

Chronological order is the most common and least interesting method for organizing such a large number of poets, and the editors of Up the Devil's Back haven't veered too far from accepted norms. But, by grouping poets into categories such as "Ancestors of the Avant-Garde," "Poetists, Surrealists and Beyond" and "Four Generations of Prison Poets," Volková and Cloutier have provided useful earmarks for readers interested in comprehending both singular poems and larger trends in Czech poetry.

Prague is the setting for several of the poems in the anthology, providing verbal postcards from a city that has witnessed more than its share of regimes, both political and creative. One of the earliest explicit mentions of Prague in the book comes from Josef Hrubý, in his poem "Litany," in which he writes: "Defend and protect me ? / from the Petřín Observation Tower."

Jáchym Topol, a contemporary writer who now works for the daily Lidové noviny, has a more quotidian but no less cynical description of the Golden City in his poem, "moreover it's clear."

haggard mugs

at the Moskevská stop

morning noon and night

remind me that there are people

who spend their lives under electric light

they participate in the general crisis marching under the bulbs

morning at home travel then at work travel then again at home ?

What do such diverse poetries have in common besides their mother tongue and geographical setting? The answer, as Volková and Cloutier write in their introduction, has to do with the volatility of the 20th century for Czechs, and explains the bitterness found in many of the poems: "The advantage of this trauma suffered by Czech literature is the resultant variety of multi-faceted conception, poetics, influences, styles and philosophies found in the writing presented."

A few questionable editorial choices keep one from fulsome praise of Up the Devil's Back. Thankfully, each poet is represented not only by poems, but also a short biographical note. The accompanying photographs, however, are grainy at best and, in some cases, more significantly manipulated. Karel Hlaváček, for example, is pictured with an abnormally protruding forehead, as if the photo (taken before the poet's death in 1898), were taken in a funhouse mirror. More likely it was Photoshop in the hands of an overzealous designer.

In a few cases, the translations in Up the Devil's Back turn wooden in a valiant attempt to keep the rhyme of the Czech original. Only one poem, "By the Boat that Carries Ashore Tea and Café," by Konstantin Biebl, is barbarous, as the word "coffee" (káva in Czech) is converted to "café" in English in order to rhyme with "away." In any case, the sheer scope of the anthology, and the fact that it brings many of these poets into English for the first time, is more than enough to allow even the most stringent critic to overlook the odd odd phrase.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com