Against forgetting : Twentieth-century poetry of witness / Carolyn Forche

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Inroduction -- Acknowledgements -- The armenian genocide -- World war I -- Revolution and repression in the soviet union -- World war II -- The holocaust, the shoah -- War and dictorship in the mediterranean -- The indo-pakistani wars -- War in the middle east -- Repression and revolution in latin america -- The struggle for civil rights and civil liberties in the united states -- War in korea and vietnam -- Repression in africa and the struggle against apartheid in south africa -- Revolutions and the struggle for democracy in china -- Selected biography -- Permissions -- Index.

"For over a decade I have been collecting the work of poets from all over the world who endured conditions of social and historical extremity during the twentieth century - those who suffered wars, imprisonment, military occupation, house arrest, forced exile, and political repression. The work that resulted, this volume, is my long effort to understand the impress of such extremity upon the poetic imagination. "My own journey began in 1980, upon my return from El Salvador, where I had worked for human rights, and let me through the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and South Africa. Along the way, something happened to the introspective poet I had been... In attempting to come to terms with the question of poetry and politics, and seeking the solace of poetic camaraderie, I turned to Anna Akhmatova, Yannis Ritsos, Paul Celan, and others. I began gathering their work, and soon found myself the repository of what came to be called 'the poetry of witness.'" So writes Carolyn Forché in the Introduction to Against Forgetting, the landmark anthology that takes its impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecht: "In the dark times, weill there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times." Bearing witness to extremity - whether of war, torture, exile, or repression - the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square. The criteria for inclusion were: excellence first, in the original and in translation. Second, all the poets must have had the personal experience of extremity. Poems in this collection were first composed on prison walls, scratched into bars of soap, or written on the poet's own hands. there are poems that were found in the coat pocket of a corpse in a common grave. Shards left by those who perished, they have been preserved and translated, passed from hand to hand. Here is a chorus of voices from the dark times, testimony to the poetic imagination seared by the fire of human suffering." -- Dust Jacket