Facing Pages

Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including Red Rover and Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Alda Merini is one of Italy's most important, and most beloved, living poets. She has won many of the major national literary prizes and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize--by the French Academy in 1996 and by Italian PEN in 2001. In Love Lessons, the distinguished American poet Susan Stewart brings us the largest and most comprehensive selection of Merini's poetry to appear in English. Complete with the original Italian on facing pages, a critical introduction, and explanatory notes, this collection gathers lyrics, meditations, and aphorisms that span fifty years, from Merini's first books of the 1950s to an unpublished poem from 2001. These accessible and moving poems reflect the experiences of a writer who, after beginning her career at the center of Italian Modernist circles when she was a teenager, went silent in her twenties, spending much of the next two decades in mental hospitals, only to reemerge in the 1970s to a full renewal of her gifts, an outpouring of new work, and great renown. Whether she is working in the briefest, most incisive lyric mode or the complex time schemes of longer meditations, Merini's deep knowledge of classical and Christian myth gives her work a universal, philosophical resonance, revealing what is at heart her tragic sense of life. At the same time, her ironic wit, delight in nature, and affection for her native Milan underlie even her most harrowing poems of suffering. In Stewart's skillful translations readers will discover a true sibyl of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. "[T]hese lovely translations will enable American readers, many of whom will be encountering these poets for the first time, to see what all the fuss is about."---David Skeel, Books & Culture "Every now and then, poetry is capable of hitting the mark--more simply, accurately and succinctly--than anything else in the world. It can touch, heel, inspire, enquire, and what's more, understand, during periods of extreme pain, peril and anguish; which, if we really, really think about it, is what accounts for poetry's inexorable validity. So when something great comes along, it certainly lightens the load and brightens the day. It's simply wonderful, and as such, ought to be embraced with both open arms and an open heart. Such is the case with Love Lessons, the selected poems of one of Italy's most beloved and important poets, Alda Merini."---David Marx, davidmarx.co.uk "Little translated . . . in the English language, [Alda Merini's] work is intelligently presented with an insightful introduction by American translator and poet Susan Stewart."---Greta Aart, Cerise Press "The line-by-line accuracy of Stewart's translations nearly makes of Love Lessons a primer for students of Italian."---Will Schutt, West Branch "What we have in Love Lessons is a fantastic selection of poems by Alda Merini, one of Italy's foremost poets, translated into English by Susan Stewart, one of America's foremost poets. As millions of Italian readers already know-and English readers are about to discover for the first time-to open a book by Merini is to discover a poetry of immediate freshness, unlike any other."-Robert P. Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Stanford University "Alda Merini is one of the most powerful contemporary female poets writing in Italian. In poems marked by a visionary clarity and lyricism, she sings of the anger and pain of both erotic love and insanity. Susan Stewart's translation is breathtaking. She has accomplished the impo

"Winner of the 2012 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, American Academy of Arts and Letters" "Runner-Up for the The 2011 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (for German Translation), The Society of Authors" "Runner-Up for the 2011 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN American Center" Michael Hofmann is an award-winning poet and translator. His Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) appeared in 2009. His other books include the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the book of essays Behind the Lines (Faber & Faber). He has translated Durs Grünbein, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Joseph Roth, among many other writers. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and lives in London and Hamburg. A bilingual edition of one of the most important German poets of the twentieth century This is the most comprehensive English translation of the work of Günter Eich, one of the greatest postwar German poets. The author of the POW poem "Inventory," among one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, Eich was rivaled only by Paul Celan as the leading poet in the generation after Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht. Expertly translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann, this collection gathers eighty poems, many drawn from Eich's later work and most of them translated here for the first time. The volume also includes the original German texts on facing pages. As an early member of "Gruppe 47" (from which Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll later shot to prominence), Eich (1907-72) was at the vanguard of an effort to restore German as a language for poetry after the vitriol, propaganda, and lies of the Third Reich. Short and clear, these are timeless poems in which the ominousness of fairy tales meets the delicacy and suggestiveness of Far Eastern poetry. In his late poems, he writes frequently, movingly, and often wryly of infirmity and illness. "To my mind," Hofmann writes, "there's something in Eich of Paul Klee's pictures: both are homemade, modest in scale, immediately delightful, inventive, cogent." Unjustly neglected in English, Eich finds his ideal translator here. "Angina Days, a crisp new selection translated by Michael Hofmann and published in Princeton's 'Facing Pages' series, is an opportunity for Eich to secure at last the English-speaking readership he has long deserved. In the German-speaking world, Eich is widely accepted as a twentieth-century classic, the supreme poet of unease. His poem 'Inventur' ('Inventory') is one of the best known poems in the language. Born in 1907 in Lebus on the Oder, a small village near Berlin, Eich was a member, along with Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, of the Gruppe 47, a literary association 'called into being to cleanse and adjust and simplify' the German language after its abuse by the Third Reich, as Hofmann explains in his excellent introduction. . . . Hofmann's translations in Angina Days have the confidence, clearness and clout to offer Eich salvation from obscurity. . . . Hofmann's new translations are neither cumbersome nor dull. They work as poems independently from the German. They are animated, idiomatic, attractively spry, and above all they allow Eich's voice to reach us loud and clear--peevish, skeptical, true to itself, irresistible."---Siriol Troup, Times Literary Supplement "Scenes of isolated survival amid bewildering change appear throughout Angina Days, an excellent comprehensive bilingual selection of Eich's poems edited and translated by Michael Hofmann."---John Palattella, Nation "At last a major portion of the poetry of Günter Eich (1907-1972) has been made accessible to an English-speaking readership in a new translation."---Axel Vieregg, Berlin Review of Books "Fortunately, renowned poet and translator Michael Hofmann has brought a selection of Eich's late poetry into sharp, searing English in Angina Days, a book that will remain the definitive translated edition of Eich's late work. . . . Eich's scale

"Winner of the 2011 Robert Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America" "Runner-Up for the 2011 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN American Center" Charles Simic (1938–2023) was a poet, essayist, and translator who won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. From 2007 to 2008 he was U.S. Poet Laureate. A native Serbian speaker, he published English translations of many poets from the former Yugoslavia. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic introduces and translates one of Serbia's most important contemporary poets Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. In Oranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjević. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition-the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English-features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjević's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation. Djordjević, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm. Whatever their subject, Djordjević's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical. "Every now and then, words, quite often in the form of poetry, have the power, the persuasion, and the all-penetrative ability to stop one in ones' tracks. . . . Such is the possibility, the sheer scale of the penetrative persuasion amid some of these poems."---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews "Charles Simic has been translating so many stimulating poets from the former Yugoslav republics for so long that I snatch up any new version by him as soon as it appears."---John Taylor, Antioch Review "Charles Simic's superbly able, balanced translations of the Serbian poet Milan Djordjevic are a double-revelation. Here stands Djordjevic, a new poet-dark, antic, and mournful-for English-language readers. And here, at the same time, is Simic, a familiar but ever more esteemed presence-mournful, antic, dark-standing in a bewitchingly altered light."-Nicholas Jenkins, Stanford University "Charles Simic has translated the work of the major Serbian poet Milan Djordjevic into wonderful poems in English. From the opening poem we know we are in the hands of a master: Djordjevic keeps the stakes high as the poems fan out from the daily to the political and metaphysical. Image, tone, and metaphor combine to create an imaginatively striking voice. This is a distinguished translation by a distinguished poet."-Ira Sadoff, author of Barter: Poems "I've read a lot of contemporary poetry in translation, but I have never read a poet quite like Milan Djordjevic. The poems Charles Simic translates here display a strange, engaging, and darkly playful imagination."-Jonathan Aaron, author of Journey to the Lost City: Poems

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862?1949) was a Belgian playwright and poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. He wrote numerous plays including Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), which later inspired an opera by Debussy. Richard Howard has translated over 150 works from the French and published 13 collections of his own poetry. In 1983 he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, and in 1970 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches in the Writing Division at Columbia University. On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary greatness had begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later Antonin Artaud pronounced, "Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the multiple riches of the subconscious into literature." Richard Howard's translation of this quietly radical work is the first to be published in nearly a century, and the first to accurately convey Maeterlinck's elusive visionary force. The poems, some of them in free verse (new to Belgium at the time), combine the decadent symbolism and the language of dislocation that Maeterlinck later perfected in his dramas. Hothouses reflects the influence not only of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. As for the title, the author said it was "a natural choice, Ghent . . . abounding in greenhouses." The poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French originals, are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne that appeared in the original volume, and by an early prose text by Maeterlinck imaginatively describing a painting by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel. A feat of daring power extraordinarily immediate and inventive, Hothouses will appeal to all lovers of poetry, and in particular to those interested in Modernism. Maeterlinck's enormous fame may have faded, but twentieth-century writers such as Beckett are still our masters who testify to its undying influence.

"Runner-Up for the 2012 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN American Center" Mark Ford teaches in the English Department at University College London. He is the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. He has also published two volumes of essays, A Driftwood Altar and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì-who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era-André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo. "Ford . . . deserves a medal and a Légion d'honneur. . . . Ford, himself a poet, combines his translation, introduction and notes with the original French and all the original illustrations; he and his publisher have given English-speaking readers privileged access to New Impressions of Africa, the book which Salvador Dalí once described as 'ungraspably poetic'"---Peter Read, Times Literary Supplement "Mark Ford's facing-pages edition is easily the most comprehensive and reader-friendly to date. The author of the definitive biography of Roussel in English, Ford brings lucidity to his translation of what is by far Roussel's most ambitious work and probably his masterpiece."---Paul Grimstad, London Review of Books "In his excellent introduction, Ford quotes Leiris's description of New Impressions of Africa as, among other things, a massive brain teaser, and many of its riddles are as humorous as they are tricky. . . . Intelligent, irascibly intelligible, and definitive."---Eric Banks, BookForum "In this poem, every road diverges into a woods. It's a chance to take them all."---Tyler Meier, Kenyon Review Newsletter "Ford has not just translated but has also deciphered the New Impressions of Africa. In his own words, the poem is nothing less than a 'brain-teaser'. His translation is, as he concedes, less concise than the original, but not by much, and perhaps inevitably so. Roussel is so precise and sharp that his words seem almost psychically ergonomic. What Ford does brightly is recreate Roussel's cleverness and wit. In short, Ford has successfully translated what is nothing less than a sort of charming anomaly of modern literature. Rather than distracting from his work, the explanatory notes encourage the reader to appreciate Roussel. This generous clothbound, bilingual edition, which includes the original illustrations that Roussel commissioned, would even have pleased the author himself."---William Heyward, Australian Book Review "That anyone could

Eavan Boland (1944–2020) was a poet and writer. Her books included Against Love Poetry. They are nine women with much in common-all German speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood. After Every War is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose Ausländer, Elisabeth Langgässer, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar Nick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the time-but with a difference. These poets see public events through the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the reader into them. The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of resilience-of language, of music, and of the human spirit-in the hardest of times. "[A] moving and essential new book. These poets have a particular angle of witness that comes from powerlessness, from being vulnerable, injured, marginal, excluded. I'm struck by the personal way these poets confront history, test and interrogate language, especially their mother tongue, question the efficacy of poetry, and repeatedly defend the importance of private feeling."---Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Book World "I like this provocative book quite a lot: it is full of beautiful poems written under the worst historical conditions possible. It makes you think about the connection between lyric beauty (there's lots of it here) and testimony."---Dan Chiasson, Poetry

J. D. McClatchy, Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Hazmat. The author of two volumes of literary essays and several opera libretti as well, he has edited numerous books, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. McClatchy has been Editor of The Yale Review since 1991. They have inspired poets and challenged translators through the centuries. The odes of Horace are the cornerstone of lyric poetry in the Western world. Their subtlety of tone and brilliance of technique have often proved elusive, especially when--as has usually been the case--a single translator ventures to maneuver through Horace's infinite variety. Now for the first time, leading poets from America, England, and Ireland have collaborated to bring all 103 odes into English in a series of new translations that dazzle as poems while also illuminating the imagination of one of literary history's towering figures. The thirty-five contemporary poets assembled in this outstanding volume include nine winners of the Pulitzer prize for poetry as well as four former Poet Laureates. Their translations, while faithful to the Latin, elegantly dramatize how the poets, each in his or her own way, have engaged Horace in a spirited encounter across time. Each of the odes now has a distinct voice, and Horace's poetic achievement has at last been revealed in all its mercurial majesty. In his introduction, J. D. McClatchy, the volume's editor and one of the translators, reflects on the meaning of Horace through the ages and relates how a poet who began as a cynical satirist went on to write the odes. For the connoisseur, the original texts appear on facing pages allowing Horace's ingenuity to be fully appreciated. For the general reader, these new translations--all of them commissioned for this book--will be an exhilarating tour of the best poets writing today and of the work of Horace, long obscured and now freshly minted. The contributors are Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, Robert Creeley, Dick Davis, Mark Doty, Alice Fulton, Debora Greger, Linda Gregerson, Rachel Hadas, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, Daryl Hine, John Hollander, Richard Howard, John Kinsella, Carolyn Kizer, James Lasdun, J. D. McClatchy, Heather McHugh, W. S. Mervin, Paul Muldoon, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Marie Ponsot, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Ellen Bryantr Voigt, David Wagoner, Rosanna Warren, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, and Stephen Yenser. "McClatchy's fellow poets have succeeded where many a scholar has failed. . . . The resulting collection is . . . a wonderfully varied tribute to the mercurial poet it honors."---Amanda Kolson Hurley, Times Literary Supplement "Many of the 35 poets here are well established--Charles Simic, Robert Bly, Anthony Hecht; others are known as distinguished translators; and the match with Horace tends to put them on top form. . . . But even the most brilliant ideas can flop in execution. This one soars. It brings us as close to the real Horace as we can come."---Tom Payne, The Daily Telegraph "This book will help initiate--and re-initiate--modern readers to some of the best lyric poetry ever produced. . . . [T]he poems are rendered not by one hand, but by the best contemporary poets. . . . J. D. McClatchy has doled out his assignments wisely to the finest poets writing in English in England, America, and Ireland, and they've done their work well."---Tracy Lee Simmons, The Weekly Standard "J. D. McClatchy's extraordinary collection gives us the richest version of Horace's odes ever made available in English."-Harold Bloom "This is an invigorating book. A veritable parnassium of poets has brought us Horace, not just in today's terms but in yesterday's glory. No doubt each reader will prefer this translation to that, but it is a choice among succulents. With schoolroom dust removed, here is a poet as bright as every day, yet sober as