BREATHTAKING GEOGRAPHICAL RANGE, with every continent represented, and the widest chronological range possible, starting with Enheduanna, “the earliest attributable author in all human literature,” who wrote in the 23rd century BCE, and ending with three still-living poets. The anthology works with a broad idea of “spiritual” as well, with poems reflecting mystical experience, of course, but also poems of doubt and despair. We get bewilderment as well as affirmation, poems of praise and poems of terror (Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), poems of our many kinds of relationship with the dead.
Akbar includes a good number of the greatest hits, so to speak, the poems you would immediately assume would be included in an anthology with this title: Rumi, Hafez, St. Francis of Assisi, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, George Herbert. We also get a few curveballs—I didn’t expect to see Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, or Nâzim Hikmet here, but the poems Akbar chooses work beautifully in this context. And there is a wealth of poems by poets I had not even heard of: the Inuit poet Uvavnuk, Sarojini Naidu, Edith Södergran…this would be a long list, actually, so I will stop here.
The book makes a worthwhile read, but there are some eccentric decisions, great and small. For a small one: each poet gets a page with name, dates, place of origin, title of poem, and, when called for, translator. Those poets from a politically distinct nation-state are identified as coming from Ghana, Chile, Vietnam, and so on. But all the poets from the United States are said to be from “America.” This seems a little perverse.
Also eccentric:
Only one poem from each poet? It seems like one could make an exception for Rumi or Dickinson.
Including Rilke’s Second Duino Elegy in David Young’s very idiosyncratic translation. I had to go re-read Stephen Mitchell to clear my palate.
The selections from the big canonical names go for the famous bits rather than something that might be less familiar but better suited to the rest of the anthology. Why Canto III of Inferno, not “En la sua volontade é nostra pace”? Why a Homeric passage in which the gods comment on Odysseus’ situation and a very similar Virgilian passage of the gods commenting on Aeneas’, both of which seem mainly exposition, when we could have had the final choruses of Oedipus at Colonus or The Bacchae or Artemis's final speech in Hippolytus? Why Satan’s speech on top of Mt. Niphates rather than something from Samson Agonistes?
No T. S. Eliot? Worse, no H. D.?
Well, you can’t please everyone.
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