In
book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the
compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by
different authors.[1] In genre fiction, the term "anthology" typically categorizes
collections of shorter works such as short stories and short novels, by different
authors, each featuring unrelated casts of characters and settings, and usually
collected into a single volume for publication. Alternatively, it can also be a
collection of selected writings (short stories, poems etc.) by one author. [2][3]
Complete collections of works are often called "complete works" or "opera omnia"
Since publishers generally found anthology publication a more flexible medium than
the collection of a single poet's work, and indeed rang innumerable changes on the
idea as a way of marketing poetry, publication in an anthology (in the right company)
became at times a sought-after form of recognition for poets. The self-definition of
movements, dating back at least to Ezra Pound's efforts on behalf of Imagism, could
be linked on one front to the production of an anthology of the like-minded. Also,
whilst not connected with poetry, publishers have produced collective works of
fiction from a number of authors and used the term anthology to describe the
collective nature of the text. These have been in a number of subjects,
including Erotica, edited by Mitzi Szereto and American Gothic Tales
Defining feature of anthologies
st
21 -century anthologies seek to represent a broad and varied spectrum
of literary production, but they retain a defining feature of the anthology as
it was consolidated at the end of the 18th century: organization by author in
chronological sequence.
Even with the addition of thematic sections, anthologized literature as we
know it today remains fundamentally historical, and each selection
implicitly functions as a representative specimen, an illustrative example
standing in for a larger authorial corpus or class of work.
deliberate selection of (especially literary) texts or extracts from
longer works, based on quality or representativeness of a wider corpus,
deliberate recontextualization in a “configurated corpus”, which creates a new
global meaning different from the mere sum of the meanings of its parts
Similarities between the process of translation & anthologising
Anthologies of translated poetry are a fascinating subject of study as
both the activity of translating and that of anthologizing presuppose
modification and selection.
Typically, their content is selected and given a new quality, meaning or
value by someone other than their original creator and likely a translator
who has filtered the poems through his own temperament.
Besides, the change of setting itself impacts the texts: suddenly they
are surrounded by strangers, usurped by a context and wedged in
between paratexts about which, before, they knew nothing.
This makes the anthology both an exceptional document of the
reception process and a ‘barometer of taste’. The pivotal act in researching
anthologies of translated poetry is reading these barometers, in terms of
norms, values, political or ideological positions, literary, historical-literary
and poetical principles.
Intended purposes of anthologies
pleasure purposes
educational purposes (either as teaching anthologies directed at young
readers since the 18th century and created with the explicit purpose of
educating taste or associated with the dissemination of mainstream
ideological, political, social, ethical, aesthetical, and moral values);
preservation purposes (representativeness of a given
literature; anthologies work as a repository or means of creating
a national cultural memory and canon as well as a universal canon);
innovation purposes (re-evaluation of texts and canon as well
as introducing novelty into a system);
protection purposes (literary production of minorities tends to become
available and known by means of anthologies, since it seldom reaches
autonomous publication or a wide reading public);
structuring purposes (as a means of structuring a branch of culture);
accessibility purposes (to make a structured selection available to a wide
reading public);
dissemination purposes (to make literary and textual models available so that
they may become productive);
subjective purposes (particularly powerful or prestigious cultural agents use
anthologies to disseminate personal predilections although often implicitly
claiming a certain representativeness and excellence);
profit purposes (certain anthologies and collections aim to meet a generalized
taste or preference with the purpose of making profit for a publisher).
spaces for intercultural encounters, forms of creative rewriting, as domestic offers of
a partial canon for a given area of a foreign culture, be it an author, nation,
literary genre, specific domain or other
The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a
distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and
indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences
of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well
as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing
these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral
responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic
voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber
and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human
delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.
