Unknown Places

Poetry. Translated from the Hungarian by Michael Blumenthal. 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...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.