Unknown Places

by Michael Blumenthal

Translations and explorations of unfamiliar terrain

Kantor shares with his fellow Central and Eastern European poets the destiny of being, unavoidably, a political poet of sorts. The past, as he admits in his long, historically-infused poem, Ancestors, hangs from me. And yet his politics ... is pervasively an antipolitics, a politics that stands back and observes with a cold, knowing, and bemused eye the vagaries and quotidian comi-tragedies of private life as it attempts to cope with and navigate the conundrums of public events and ideologies. A smoker, a Hungarian, a nervous, often sleepless, man who is, at the same time, a poet of rivers and trees, Kantor, as he himself says, "takes it all into account" the comedy, the tragedy, the pathos, the need for human warmth and connection, all the vagaries and cruelties of history and men notwithstanding.... As exemplified by the deeply moving, yet tactfully restrained, elegy for his deceased father, Between Margaret Bridge and Arpad Bridge, neither Kantor's repertoire nor his sensibility are limited to the ironic forms so often thoughtlessly associated with Central and Eastern Europeans. ... Across all cultures and rivers, across all systems and divides, they go by the same, rarely achieved, name: poetry.

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