The title of this compendium rendered in English would be Haiku—Epigram—Short Poem: Small Forms in the Lyric Poetry of Central and Eastern Europe. The articles that make up the volume treat short lyric forms as they occur in German, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian poetry. One could argue that the work is esoteric, given its focus on less commonly practiced poetic forms produced in less commonly taught languages. In fact, the volume is unabashedly esoteric, but by no means irrelevant. In the realm of culture, the authors grapple with concepts of minimalism and the avant-garde in relation not only to the written word, but also to the image: photography, painting, and hybrid forms of text and image. Furthermore, the editors argue that in the realm of politics, small forms, with their tendency toward “the unfinished, unsystematic, and undogmatic” (das Unfertige, Unsystematische und Undogmatische), serve a subversive political purpose as they destabilize the dogma-laden legacy of socialist realism that dominated central and eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.
The volume emerged from a workshop held in Berlin in 2016 in conjunction with an exhibition entitled Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Haiku (The Unbearable Lightness of the Haiku). The book is divided into four sections. The first, “By Way of Introduction,” presents an interview conducted by Zornitza Kazalarska with the Slovak literary scholar Peter Zajac, and a feuilleton by the German Slavist Heinrich Kirschbaum. Each of these pieces comments on the relation of minimalism to the power of language and the power of silence, and the ability of language to undercut itself. In addition, Zajac provides incisive ruminations on the way the haiku form changes its nature, from elegant to straightforward, to humorous, depending on the language, culture, and context of its production. Kirschbaum ponders the metaphysical meaning of brevity in relation to the work of Czesław Miłosz.
The rest of the book is divided among sections under the headings Betrachtungen I, Fundstücke, Betrachtungen II (Considerations I, Found Objects, and Considerations II). Among the various articles in “Considerations I,” for example, Csongor Löincz, in his essay, “X-Rays of the Lyrical Voice: Lajos Kassák and the Early Works of Attila József,” examines the way poetry represents parallels between the revelations of imaging technology and psychoanalysis. In her essay “Multilingualism, or the Small Form of the Lyric: Some Conceptual Considerations (Fridrich—Součková—Mickiewicz)” [N.B., this refers to Iwona Mickiewicz, not Adam Mickiewicz], Alfrun Kliems introduces poems that incorporate words in multiple languages and discusses the concept of “wanderwords”: “words and phrases in other languages that disrupt, enchant, occlude or highlight” the primary language, and can therefore “perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique” (80). With a title that sounds as if it were invented by Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat, Gertraude Zand writes about “Super-Sexdadaism! On the Epigrammatic in the Midnight Edition Series and on the Poetics of Bohumil Hrabal.” Not surprisingly, the poems provided as examples feature anatomical terms in Czech and German that are not typically included in scholarly discussions.
The “Found Objects” section is made up of essays originally published elsewhere. Among these are the Bulgarian poet Ivan Metodiev's manifesto “Nava-Style” espousing the minimalist form “nava.” The bellicose Metodiev asserts, “When a thousand people say, “That's not nava!” but one person says, “That is nava!” then it is nava” (154). This is followed by the transcript of a Bulgarian roundtable discussion of nava under the title “The Law of the Lion's Tooth (1992): A Discussion from the Literaturen vestnik.” The discussion is directed “at both the enemies and the supporters of nava” (155) and begins with a debate as to whether nava should be defined solely as “östliche,” or an eastern European phenomenon, or something broader. “Östliche” wins the day, and the discussion moves on from there. One of the most interesting pieces in the section comes from the Czech-German artist-activist Karel Trinkewitz. His essay “Poetry of a Moment and of Eternity” from 1986, here translated from Czech into German, includes what he calls a “Haiku Collage” made up of rows of original sketches and haiku texts in Czech, and a visual “Poem Made from Trash” from 1983, which consists of eighteen squares, each containing a particular type of trash, such as toothpaste tubes, bread slices, perfume bottles, toys, pills, but no text (168–70). The final piece in this section is Czesław Miłosz's introduction to a volume of haiku poems. The introduction has been translated from Polish into German, while Miłosz himself translated the haiku into Polish from Japanese and English originals. He acknowledges the difficulty of this effort, concluding, “I simply try to sketch a picture with a few strokes of the pen…. This collection can be considered my private sketchbook given to the reader to develop his own insights” (178).
The section “Considerations II” continues the spirit of “Considerations I,” including several commentaries on the haiku form as such; on “two-liners,” which is to say poems consisting of two lines of verse; and on small verse forms in the “Metamodern” movement. Like the preceding pieces, these articles focus primarily on authors who are not well known outside of eastern Europe.
Overall, the book is a bit of a slog because the context is not well known to Anglophone readers and because the back and forth of translation can be linguistically unsettling. However, the effort is worthwhile. The book provides a number of intriguing perspectives on what a poem actually is, and how poetry relates to the human condition. In a world constantly beleaguered by the complexities of geopolitical life and culture on the vast central and east European plain; we need all the insight we can get.
