Something Indecent

Something Indecent is intended as a kind of symposium on European poetry. Seven contemporary Eastern European poetsAdam Zagajewski, Vera Pavlova, Toma alamun, Ale teger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus Alianka, and editor Valzhyna Mortintroduce 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 choicesand the reasons for those choicesare 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, Nzim Hikmet, Antonio Machado, Czesaw Miosz, Cesare Pavese, Raymond Queneau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Toma alamun, Sappho, Anna Swir, Wisawa Szymborska, Georg Trakl, Tomas Transtrmer, Csar Vallejo, Paul Valry, and many others.