"Chanameed" is a novel in verse, set in a fictional village on Long Island. The present volume also contains the London cycle “Down in the Tube Station (Not Necessarily at Midnight)”, as well as other verses.

Primarily consists of: Transactions, v. 1, 3, 5-8, 10-14, 17-21, 24-28, 32, 34-35, 38, 42-43; and: Collections, v. 2, 4, 9, 15-16, 22-23, 29-31, 33, 36-37, 39-41; also includes lists of members.

‘Why do you whimper and wail, O Tatra streams and rivers, who carry your plaintive lament resounding to the sea?’ asks the narrator toward the end of The Slovaks, in Ancient Days, and Now. They respond: ‘Because our human compatriots do not join together in memory, as we our waters mix with our origin, and because their lives do not resound booming, but roll on unconsciously, like hidden streams, silently to the sea of the life of the nations, young man!’ This quotation from the most famous prose work of Ľudovít Štúr (1815 – 1856) might be set as a motto to the literary career of Slovakia’s greatest Romantic poet, publicist, and political activist. For all of Štúr’s writings aim at one goal: the propagation of the national traditions of the Slovaks in an age when their nation was threatened with such repression from the Magyar majority in Hungary, that the complete extinction of the Slovak language and culture was a real possibility. Slavdom: A Selection of his Writings in Prose and Verse presents the reader with a wide selection of the creative output of a great Slovak writer, and an important Pan-Slav thinker. Divided in three parts: ‘Slovakia,’ ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘Russia,’ it reflects the development of Štúr’s thought, from his insistence on the importance of the Slovak past and the quality of Slovak culture, through his attempts to find a modus vivendi within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by uniting all of the Slavic nations of Austria together in a federation under the Habsburg crown (Austro-Slavism) to his arguments for all Slavs to unite under the hegemony of Russia, when the events following the Spring of the Peoples in 1848 proved Austro-Slavism a dead alley. Slavdom offers a generous selection of Štúr’s writings, from Slavic apologetics such as The Contribution of the Slavs to European Civilisation though selections of his poetry, chiefly, the two great chansons de geste centring on the ancient Great Moravian Empire: Svatoboj and Matúš of Trenčín. A must read for anyone interested in Slovak literature, Pan-Slavism, and European Romanticism in general. This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.

‘Somewhere in the cosmos there are happier places,’ muses Martin Vrána, the hero of Jan Balabán’s novel Where was the Angel Going?. ‘People are transported to the planet Earth for punishment. Part of the punishment is their ignorance of the fact. We’ve forgotten that we’ve forgotten.’ Yet, as this very reflection implies, in Martin’s case, part of his ‘punishment’ is his ever-present memory of an Eden from which he had been expelled. The prototypical outsider, a member of a minority community within a minority community (a Protestant in the overwhelmingly agnostic Czech Republic), Martin, like the survivor of a shipwreck, strives to shore up his vital resources amidst the billows of an inimical world, which constantly advance and threaten to wash away everything he holds dear. Where was the Angel Going? is a novel made up of forty-six linked stories. As always, Balabán’s prose is so vivid that the reader can practically taste the ‘honey and dust,’ which are the characteristic flavours of Ostrava. And yet, in its lyrical message of love and friendship as basic human needs no less critical than air and water, Where was the Angel Going is nonetheless an eminently universal novel. Everyone will find him or herself in these pages, as we are all of us descended from that first pair of exiles, Adam and Eve. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

In Rafał Wojasiński’s new engaging masterpiece Tefil, we come across a curious – and eerie – situation. A young man named Rozmaryn finds a photograph depicting his mother in the company of a stranger. He lost both his parents at an early age, and never even knew his mother. So he sets off in search of that stranger, and this leads him to one of the most articulate, yet unsettling and possibly mentally handicapped characters as can be found anywhere in literature: Tefil. A balding and somewhat odiferous inhabitant of a garret flat in a sleepy town somewhere in Poland, never married, Tefil, who spent his working years as a village factotum, now exists as something of a self-interested Oxfam bin collecting the clothes of the dead. He also goes to extreme lengths to avoid paying back insignificant debts and cadging pastries, coffee, and sometimes alcoholic dinners, from passers-by to whom he attaches himself like a tick. He also philosophises, disparaging the sense of human life, and singing a paean to “all-conquering mould”, which is the only living creature that cannot be destroyed (supposedly, it even survives being eaten and digested), and which is fated to overcome – to consume – all other life, including man and his civilisation. How does that make us feel, as human beings ourselves? Rafał Wojasiński’s character is challenging, repulsive, and yet fatally attractive. Like Rozmaryn, we cannot tear ourselves away from his rushing stream of words and ideas, which fascinate us while filling us with existential dread. But is Tefil serious? Or is he just spilling an unending yarn, talking for the sake of hearing his unquestionably spellbinding voice? One hopes it is the latter, and it just might be. For Tefil is a poetic novel, something in the line of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; something of a literary equivalent to absolute music and non-representational painting. Standing before Wojasiński’s puzzling canvas, hearing his dissonant composition through to the end, the reader might be left bewildered – but will certainly not find his time spent with Tefil unrewarding.

International brigades of mice and rats join forces to defend the rodents of Poland, threatened with extermination at the paws of cats favoured by the ancient ruler King Popiel, a sybaritic, cowardly ruler... The Hag of Discord incites a vicious rivalry between monastic orders, which only the good monks’ common devotion to... fortified spirits... is able to allay... The present translation of the mock epics of Poland’s greatest figure of the Enlightenment, Ignacy Krasicki, brings together the Mouseiad, the Monachomachia, and the Anti-monachomachia — a tongue-in-cheek ‘retraction’ of the former work by the author, criticised for so roundly (and effectively) satirising the faults of the Church, of which he himself was a prince. Krasicki towers over all forms of eighteenth-century literature in Poland like Voltaire, Swift, Pope, and LaFontaine all rolled into one. While his fables constitute his most well-known works of poetry, in the words of American comparatist Harold Segel, ‘the good bishop’s mock-epic poems [...] are the most impressive examples of his literary gifts.’ This English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski is rounded off by one of Krasicki’s lesser-known works, The Chocim War, the poet’s only foray into the genre of the serious, Vergilian epic.

‘Perhaps some day I’ll disappear forever,’ muses the master-builder Psymmachus in Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Cleopatra and Caesar, ‘Becoming one with my work...’ Today, exactly two hundred years from the poet’s birth, it is difficult not to hear Norwid speaking through the lips of his character. The greatest poet of the second phase of Polish Romanticism, Norwid, like Gerard Manley Hopkins in England, created a new poetic idiom so ahead of his time, that he virtually ‘disappeared’ from the artistic consciousness of his homeland until his triumphant rediscovery in the twentieth century. Chiefly lauded for his lyric poetry, Norwid also created a corpus of dramatic works astonishing in their breadth, from the Shakespearean Cleopatra and Caesar cited above, through the mystical dramas Wanda and Krakus, the Unknown Prince, both of which foretell the monumental style of Stanisław Wyspiański, whom Norwid influenced, and drawing-room comedies such as Pure Love at the Sea Baths and The Ring of the Grande Dame which combine great satirical humour with a philosophical depth that can only be compared to the later plays of T.S. Eliot. All of these works, and more, are collected in Charles S. Kraszewski’s English translation of Norwid’s Dramatic Works, which along with the major plays also includes selections from Norwid’s short, lyrical dramatic sketches — something along the order of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Dramatic Works will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone who loves Polish Literature, Romanticism, or theatre in general.