Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse, translated and edited by Paul Selver

Eastern European stories and poems in English translation

Wladyslaw Reymont

As the title suggests, Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse is a collection of short literary works from Eastern Europe. In this context, “Slavonic” means the same as “Slavic.” The book includes selections from Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian authors. This volume was edited by British writer Paul Selver, who also translated all of the works into English. In addition to writing his own novels and poetry, Selver was a multilinguist who also translated German, French, and Norwegian works. He was primarily known for his Czech translations, in particular the works of Karel Capek (who does not appear in this book). This anthology was published in 1919, but the works included date as far back as 1845.

The prose section of this volume includes short stories, brief essays, and a couple of one-act plays. A few recognizable names appear in this volume. The great Russian master of short stories Anton Chekhov provides a finely drawn comical tale, “In a Foreign Land.” Polish Nobel Prize-winner Wladyslaw Reymont is represented by a scene excerpted from his novel Promised Land. Polish author Boleslaw Prus’s story “From the Legends of Ancient Egypt” calls to mind his novel Pharaoh, set in the same era. The rest of the names on the table of contents will likely be new to the vast majority of English-language readers. The better entries include Czech author Jan Neruda’s “The Vampire,” which is not the horror story its title implies, but it does deliver a surprisingly morbid ending. Polish writer Wiktor Gomulicki’s portrait of an aged farmer is the literary equivalent of a gritty Gustave Courbet painting. Ukraine’s foremost poet of the 19th century, Taras Shevtchenko, tells his own story in an autobiographical essay written for a literary journal. Reymont’s selection is the best in the book, but if this were a short-story Olympics, the Russians would take the gold with strong showings by Chekhov, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Fyodor Sologub.

The latter half of the book is devoted to poetry, about 130 pages worth from the authors of seven nations. Almost all are written in rhyming verse, with Selver doing his best to preserve the rhyme schemes in his English translations. Many are romantic evocations of nature typical of the late 19th century. The more interesting selections deal with subject matter unique to the authors’ nationalities and ethnicity, the most obvious example being Czech poet Petar Preradovic’s anthemic “To Slavdom.” Shevtchenko’s poem “If Lordlings, Ye Could Only Know . . .” depicts a hellish view of serfdom. Petr Bezruc, in his series of poems, laments the plight of the oppressed Silesian Czechs. One surprising entry is Czech poet Antonin Sova’s “To Theodor Mommsen.” Rather than a tribute to the German Nobel laureate and classical historian, Sova’s poem is an extended insult that attacks Mommsen as the “arrogant spokesman of slavery.”

Classic Slavic literature is hard to come by in English translation. Selver’s welcome anthology does the valuable service of introducing the British or American reader to many hitherto unfamiliar authors. He even includes helpful mini-biographies of each writer. If you discover authors you like here, however, it may be impossible to find further samples of their work in English. Overall, the good and bad entries in this volume average out to a middling collection. Those with an interest in Eastern European culture, however, will appreciate the bits of history, artistic heritage, and national customs revealed in these stories and poems. Because of the large quantity of verse, it will especially appeal to readers who enjoy poetry.

Stories in this collection
(Also 130 pages of poems, not listed below)

In a Foreign Land by Anton Chekhov

My Life by Dimitri Merezhkovsky

The Tiny Man by Fyodor Sologub

The Demigod by S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky

Autobiography by Taras Shevtchenko

The Ploughman by Wiktor Gomulicki

From the Legends of Ancient Egypt by Boleslaw Prus

Chopin by Stanislaw Przybyszewski

In the Old Town at Lodz by Wladyslaw Reymont

Sonia by Jan Svatopluk Machar

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

The Advent of Spring in the South by Arne Novák

June (play in one act) by Frána Srámek

The Latin Boy by Simo Matavulj

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The World: Or, Instability by Constantine S. Rafinesque

A natural scientist’s cosmological poem

Constantine Rafinesque

Naturalist Constantine Rafinesque (1783-1840) was born in Constantinople to French and German parents. In his adulthood he moved to America, where he remained. Like John James Audubon, whom he knew, Rafinesque wandered the wilds of America, studying its natural wonders and logging new species. Unlike Audubon, who specialized in birds and mammals, Rafinesque studied everything—animals, plants, rocks, Native American tribes, and more—and considered himself an expert on just about every subject under the sun. He published research in dozens of fields but was considered by many of his scientific contemporaries to be a dilettante, a crackpot, or a fraud. Rafinesque did not confine his pursuits to the sciences but dabbled in the humanities as well, including poetry. In 1836, he published The World: Or, Instability, an extended poem in which he expounds upon his scientific and philosophical views.

In the 19th century, when everyone read poetry and it seems nearly everyone wrote it, poetic verse was considered a legitimate medium through which to convey scientific observations and theories, at least to the general public. Rafinesque uses The World to outline his own personal cosmology, encompassing everything from science to religion to ethics. The nearest equivalent in American literature might be Edgar Allen Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem. A flattering preface to The World, likely written by Rafinesque himself, overstates that “it is as if Newton had explained his laws of attraction and repulsion in a poem, instead of a mathematical work.” Rafinesque’s main “law” is that all matter is in a state of instability and change, destruction and renewal. This is hardly a groundbreaking thesis, but his argument does contain some foreshadowings of evolutionary theory. While the concept of instability is constantly referred to in the poem, it is really just a vague foundation from which Rafinesque pontificates on a variety of subjects.

The main body of The World is a poem of 5400 lines. This is supplemented by some introductory matter, appendices, and 88 endnotes. The entire poem is written in metric verse, unrhymed but for the occasional random rhyming couplet. The text is thematically divided into twenty chapters, then closes with “The Universal Prayer and Hymn of Mankind.” Religion is a main concern of the poem, perhaps more so than science. Rafinesque believes strongly in God, and also in angels, though he criticizes organized religion and does not hold to a literal creationist interpretation of the Bible. Although he sees nature as the ultimate expression of God, he makes it clear that he is no subscriber to pantheism, which he ridicules. Nor is he a materialist. He believes in the dualism of Descartes, not the monism of Spinoza, and in human free will. Rafinesque also asserts himself an abolitionist, a pacifist, and a Republican in the French sense of the word. He also speaks of life on other worlds and reincarnation. The poem occasionally brings up some antiquated scientific beliefs, such as volcanoes on the moon and spontaneous combustion caused by alcoholism.

The World is unlikely to garner praise from poetry critics. As someone who is not a habitual reader of poetry, however, I enjoyed the clear didactic style of Rafinesque’s poesy. He often uses metaphoric imagery and lofty turns of phrase, but never to the point where such flourishes obscure the lesson he is trying to impart. This work is primarily valuable not for its literary quality or even its scientific content, but rather for the insight it gives us into Rafinesque’s personality and values. Readers are unlikely to agree with everything he has to say, but one can still find practical pearls of wisdom. I would have preferred much less talk about God and angels and far more about the natural world, but I nonetheless enjoyed The World as an inspiring celebration of natural science, even if it is a bit heavy on Christian sermonizing.
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Cane by Jean Toomer

Harlem Renaissance modernism

Cane, published in 1923, is a work of fiction by African American author Jean Toomer. (Toomer is a male author, so presumably Jean is pronounced in the French fashion.) This is a modernist work arising out of the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement. Many literary critics consider Cane a novel, but it does not conform to the conventional structure of a novel. It is really a collection of short stories and poetry that all share thematic and stylistic similarities. Each story or poem functions as a vignette depicting a view of African American life in the United States. In terms of formal structure, its closest approximation in mainstream literature would be Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

The book is roughly divided into thirds. The first section consists of scenes set in the rural South, frequently in the state of Georgia. The title of the book is derived from the sugar cane that grows on Southern plantations. The stories and poems of the second third of the book take place in urban settings including Washington, DC, and Chicago. The final third of the book is a novella entitled “Kabnis” that returns to the South for a story set in the fictional town of Sempter, Georgia. “Kabnis” is named after its main character, Ralph Kabnis, but surprisingly Toomer overwhelmingly favors female protagonists in the Cane stories. The book often feels like a study in womanhood as much as an exploration of the African American experience.

The Southern portions of the book are more powerful than the urban stories. Toomer combines the gritty reality of the modern South and echoes of slavery’s past with evocative images of the natural environment to create a new type of Southern Gothic atmosphere permeated by a lingering sense of dread. Toomer does for the Black South what William Faulkner did for the White South, but Toomer did it first. Without the added dimensions of the natural and Southern historical imagery, Toomer’s urban scenes are less compelling. The plots tend to be less about race and more about romantic relationships. These love stories aren’t conventional or formulaic by any means, however, but rather complex psychological portraits of sexual power politics. In the city stories, Toomer’s prose tends to be more ostentatiously modern. Like so many modernists of the 1920s, it seems like he wants to be the next James Joyce, which results in a lot of deliberate verbal gymnastics that turn the narrative into a puzzle that must be deciphered before it can be understood or appreciated. While this sort of experimental wordplay gets annoying in the fiction, it is quite at home in the poetry, which is intriguingly evocative throughout the book.

The rural Southern stories don’t suffer as much from the obtuse modernist style, but some of it leaks into “Kabnis,” a story about a Black Northerner transplanted into a small Southern town. Much of the novella is consists of dialogue, much like a play but written in prose form rather than as a dramatic script. “Kabnis” is more effective in its atmosphere and psychological authenticity than in its plot, which meanders to a conclusion that’s open to interpretation.

One’s appreciation of Cane will largely hinge upon the reader’s tolerance for the impressionistic stream-of-consciousness prose stylings of early modernist writers like Joyce or Faulkner. For those willing to decode the plot and all its symbolism, this groundbreaking work yields much insight into the racial reality of early twentieth-century America.
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A Personal Anthology by Jorge Luis Borges

Challengingly erudite assortment of fiction, poetry, and essays

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is one of Latin America’s most critically acclaimed authors. Borges was a prolific all-around man of letters who published so much fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that no one seems to have compiled an authoritative bibliography of his work. In 1961, Borges published A Personal Anthology, a sort of self-retrospective of his career up to that time, edited by himself. Translated into English in 1967, the contents of the volume are comprised of short stories, poems, and essays—48 pieces in all—all of which are quite brief. Some of the selections are so short they can best be described as observations.

A fraction of the pieces included here are set in Borges’s native Argentina. In such stories, which sometimes take the form of westerns (or in Argentina’s case, southerns?), Borges contrasts the European culture of metropolitan Buenos Aires with the rugged gaucho life of the surrounding rural pampas. In stories like “The South,” “The Dead Man,” and “The End,” characters try to navigate from one world to the other and often find themselves in over their heads.

Beyond his tales set in South America, the writer Borges most calls to mind is Umberto Eco. The scope of Borges’s writings encompasses all of world history, including ancient and medieval times. Like Eco, Borges has a particular fascination for books and writers of the past, of all languages, and he demonstrates his encyclopedic mind through frequently arcane references. Unlike Eco, who seems to take pride in educating his readers on the world’s intellectual history, Borges just assumes you already know what he knows. While one can’t help but admire his impressive erudition, one also has to wonder if many of the critics and fans who praise Borges really understand what he’s saying much of the time.

Many of the briefer entries in this work, fiction and nonfiction, do little more than draw connections between historical figures and books from different corners of the globe and different eras in time, as if Borges were engaging in the mental gymnastics of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. This intellectual pinball makes his poetry quite interesting and enigmatic. In his fictional narratives, Borges defies conventional rules of storytelling. Even time itself doesn’t necessarily follow a linear path, and he often injects himself into his stories, blurring the line between author, narrator, and character. Such quirks feel appropriate in works that touch on science fiction and fantasy, like “Funes, the Memorious” or “The Aleph,” but often feel obtrusive elsewhere.

I don’t know if any of the writings in A Personal Anthology can be considered among Borges’s best work, but the volume overall, in presenting an ample and diverse selection of his work, serves as a fine introduction to his writing for the novice. That doesn’t mean that all the works included make for a satisfying reading experience. It seems as if the selections were chosen for their brevity, and they often feel more like incomplete sketches than fully realized ideas. Borges’s narratives are often frustratingly disjointed, and his style is a little too arty and pretentious for all but the highest denizens of the ivory tower to enjoy. If I had to judge his career on A Personal Anthology alone, the verdict would not be entirely favorable, but this collection did pique my interest enough to want to delve further into his extensive bibliography.

Stories and essays in this collection
(Poems and very brief selections are not included in the list below)

Death and the Compass

The South 

The Dead Man

Funes, the Memorious 

A New Refutation of Time 

The Circular Ruins 

Inferno I, 32 

Parable of the Palace 

The Wall and the Books 

The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald 

Averroë's Search 

The Maker 

Everything and Nothing 

From Someone to No One 

Forms of a Legend 

The Zahir 

The Aleph

Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz 

The End

Story of the Warrior and the Captive 

The Modesty of History

The Secret Miracle 

Editor’s Epilogue

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The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence Buell

An excellent guide to the movement as a whole
While Transcendentalism was an extremely important development in the history of American literature and philosophy, likely few readers today could define the movement beyond calling up the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. A few enlightened souls might stretch so far as to mention Margaret Fuller. Despite its name recognition, Transcendentalism is a very difficult school of thought to pin down. Many of the Transcendentalists themselves, and Emerson in particular, denied the existence of any “school” or “movement,” likening the group to an amorphously diverse congregation of vaguely like-minded individuals. Nevertheless, Transcendentalism was a genuine movement with concrete philosophical precepts and an agenda for social change. In the 2006 book The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, editor Lawrence Buell not only amasses an excellent collection of writings but also delivers a thorough demystification of this crucial and confusing period of development in American thought.

Buell opens the book with an enlightening introduction that outlines the history of American Transcendentalism, its intellectual origins, and a summary of the philosophical views common to its members. The movement originally arose when a number of liberal Unitarian ministers including Emerson, influenced by German philosophers, departed from the strict confines of the Unitarian church to found their own independent congregations. These heretics embraced a more pantheistic conception of deity in which a divinity exists in all human beings. This philosophy emphasized the sacredness of the individual, who, to live up to the divinity within, must follow his or her own path to personal actualization and spiritual fulfillment. An intimate experience of nature, as evident from the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, was a means toward accomplishing this, as was a love for one’s fellow man exerted through virtuous social activism. Emerson at first was reluctant to get involved in social issues, wishing to keep Transcendentalism on a purely intellectual plane, but over time the movement’s members became more outspoken as advocates for religious liberty, educational reform, feminism, and the abolition of slavery.

The writings included here are a mix of essays, journal entries, memoirs, letters, aphorisms, utopian constitutions, articles from the group’s journal The Dial, and a generous helping of poetry. Many of the selections are relatively brief, well-chosen excerpts from longer works, but a few major manifestoes are reproduced in their entirety, such as Emerson’s “Nature,” “Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” and “The American Scholar,” and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” This collection goes well beyond the two household names to feature many of the movement’s lesser-known movers and shakers. Highlights include Fuller’s feminist manifesto “The Great Lawsuit,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay on nature and health “Saints, and Their Bodies,” Theodore Parker’s antislavery writings “The Function of Conscience” and “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and the poetry of William Ellery Channing II and Jones Very. Buell also includes commentary, some of it critical, from notable writers outside the movement such as Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. In all cases, Buell provides excellent introductions that provide insightful historical context.

Not every selection in this volume is a pleasure to read, as some of the writers are deliberately obscure and overly mystical in their delivery. As a whole, however, this is an excellent collection that provides a fascinating and comprehensive education into the history, literature, and philosophy of the Transcendentalists.
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Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz

Better bone up on your Polish history
Pan Tadeusz is an epic poem written in the Polish language by Adam Mickiewicz. It is considered the national epic of Poland and, though published in 1834, perhaps the last great epic poem in European literature. Although it was written in verse, my review is based on the English prose translation by George Rapall Noyes, published in 1917.

Although many Poles consider this to be their country’s greatest work of literature, the story takes place entirely in Lithuania. Prior to 1795, Poland and Lithuania were united into one Commonwealth, and the two regions traditionally shared a great deal of cultural common ground. The events of the story occur in the years 1911 and 1912. At this time neither Poland nor Lithuania existed as an independent state, as the Commonwealth had been conquered and partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Lithuania was under the jurisdiction of Russia, and its inhabitants chafed under the constrictive rule of the Muscovites. Meanwhile, Napoleon was conquering much of Europe, and the Poles and Lithuanians looked to him in anticipation as a possible savior who could free their nation from Russian oppression and help them regain their independence.

During this period in history, Polish society was still operating under a system of feudalism. Poland had a weak central government which allowed a great deal of autonomy on the part of the nobles. Landowners could even summon their own armies and attack their neighbors as a means of settling disputes. This figures into the story of Pan Tadeusz, which deals with a long-standing feud between two Lithuanian families, the Soplicas and the Horeszkos. Tadeusz Soplica arrives at the estate of his uncle, referred to simply as the Judge. There a group of nobles and public dignitaries have assembled, where they all engage in banquets and hunting parties. While a few of the younger attendees occupy themselves with matters of love, a contentious lawsuit between the two aforementioned families engenders an animosity that leads to violence.

Though the plot of Pan Tadeusz is sufficiently engaging, it doesn’t seem to be Mickiewicz’s primary concern. He’s more interested in creating a patriotic tribute to his beloved country. Each chapter opens with a beautiful paean to the natural beauty of Lithuania. Then Mickiewicz minutely describes each meal, dance, and costume in loving detail, while dropping the names of glorious generals from Poland’s military past. Along the way the non-Polish reader learns a lot about that nation’s culture, but a lot of prior knowledge is required to truly understand everything that’s taking place. The Noyes edition is heavily loaded with explanatory footnotes, which provide helpful context but tend to overwhelm the narrative. I’m no scholar of Polish history, but I do know enough to have read the works of Polish authors like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont, Boleslaw Prus, and others. Yet this one was really tough to get through. Stylistically it bears much resemblance to the romantic epics of Sienkiewicz, but it’s not nearly as accessible to the non-Polish reader.

I certainly won’t fault the author for writing a book that appeals primarily to his countrymen rather than to the American reader. I think the translator does deserve a little blame, however, for some clumsy and mystifying passages. Pan Tadeusz is no doubt a great work of literature, but for this Polish-American reader, reading it was often not so much a labor of love as just simply a labor.
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The Complete Poetry of Jack London

Don’t give up your day job

Jack London

Jack London is famous for his short stories and novels, but he also enthusiastically studied poetry and even made an attempt to establish a reputation for himself as a poet. Despite publishing about a dozen and a half poems, however, he never successfully achieved this goal. Nevertheless, the craft of poetry certainly informed his prose. One can find in his works passages that have a definite poetic quality—the depictions of nature in The Call of the Wild and White Fang, for example, or the opening scene of his short story “All Gold Canyon” come to mind. On the contrary, however, when London injects passages of poetry into his fiction, it’s often the most annoying part of the book, like the irritating “Abalone Song” that keeps showing up in The Valley of the Moon, or the snippets of tiresome verse with which the married couple in The Little Lady of the Big House serenade each other. London even wrote an entire play in verse—The Acorn Planter—which is one of the most mind-numbing works he ever produced. 

Where can one find London’s poetry? It is included in a few of the ebook collections of his complete works, such as the Delphi Classics edition. Much of it is available online at the World of Jack London web site. Daniel J. Wichlan edited a volume of The Complete Poetry of Jack London that was published in 2007, which not only collects all the poems but also provides publication information for each. It also contains a lot of bibliographic material that I haven’t read, so I can’t review that book as a whole, but Wichlan is usually a thorough and conscientious editor. The book’s introduction, however, tries to make the case that London was “a poet first” and a reluctant writer of fiction. That’s pushing things a little too far. A movie actor might want to be a rock star, but putting out an album doesn’t make him Bob Dylan. London himself stated that he “dabbled a little in poetry.” His entire surviving poetic output, published and unpublished, only takes up about 75 pages and will occupy a little over an hour of your time. 

There was a time when a writer wasn’t considered a true man of letters unless he wrote poetry. By the time London achieved his literary fame, that era was coming to a close and novels had gained acceptance as the dominant literary medium. Nevertheless, London and other writers of his day looked back on the glory days of literature with fondness and tried to emulate their poetic forefathers. The result is that London often seems more interested in working within the meter and rhyme scheme of established poetic forms than he is in what he’s actually trying to say. At times even the subject matter is nostalgic and antiquated. “The Sea Sprite and the Shooting Star” is about a love affair between the two title “characters”. That stuff may have been cute back in the eighteenth century, but it don’t fly in the twentieth. “The Way of War” is a more modern piece that’s sufficiently clever to amuse. At least half of London’s poems were written with humorous intent or aim for cleverness with a cute twist of an ending. Rarely does he try to express anything truly profound. When he does, the results aren’t bad. The best poem he wrote was “Lover’s Liturgy,” which exhorts us to enjoy the life we live rather than deprive ourselves of pleasure in hopes of some eternal reward. Some other better efforts in a more serious vein are “A Heart,” “George Sterling,” and “When All the World Shouted My Name.”

Though I may not be particularly qualified to critique poetry, I am a knowledgeable (albeit non-academic) fan of Jack London’s work, and can speak to members of that audience about whether these are worth reading. The short answer is that these poems are only valuable to the most intensive of London scholars. To the avid reader, not particularly interested in poetry, who’s just looking to finish London’s complete works, you can in all good conscience skip his poems.