Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation

María Negroni was born in Argentina in 1951. Recipient of the 2000-2001 Octavio Paz Fellowship for Poetry, she has published a novel, two books of essays, and six books of poetry in her native Spanish, one of which has previously appeared in bilingual editions in the United States. Night Journey is the English-language debut of El viaje de la noche (1994), which received an Argentine National Book Award in 1997. Her translations from French and English have been widely published. She teaches Latin American Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Anne Twitty has translated books and numerous shorter works into English by Negroni, the Cuban poet Magali Alabau, and others. She was formerly editor of the Epicycle section of Parabola, in which she published essays on myth, creation, and memory. One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. Night Journey is the English-language debut of the work that won María Negroni an Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams--dreams she renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and Calvino. In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality. Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between life and death. Night Journey reflects a mastery of a traditional form while brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural, multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a "medieval tabard" where a pelvis should be, a "lipless grin," a "beach severed from the ocean." In one poem "nomadic cities" whisk past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's eyes. Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's "indomitable literary intelligence" subdues an unspoken terror--helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what it is can one discover its "hidden splendor," the "invisible center of the poem." As readers of this magnificent work will discover, this is a journey that, because its every fleeting image conjures a thousand words of fertile silence, can be savored again and again. "One of my own newest designated dreamers is the Argentine poet Maria Negroni, whose debut volume in English, Night Journey, takes the wordless logic of dreams and turns it into her own precise, oracular music. This book is pervaded by the spooky sense of a woman traveling in many directions, most of them unrequested, jouneying through shadows and mirrors, navigating the mysteries by shuttling between life and death."---Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post "Night Journey is a collection of prose poems, each recounting a dream sequence. . . . Many of Negroni's dreams combine elements of surrealism and lyric narrative, which creates a matrix of symbols both archetypal and idiosyncratic through which the poet confronts generally nameless, yet recognizable, fears. . . . It reminds me that when we read wonderful poetry it's as if we are privy to a delicious rumor, and we must pass it on."---Priscila Uppal, Toronto Globe and Mail "Arising from this intricate collection is a message. The poet comes to learn that her quest is both multiple and unified; for her, the act of writing cannot be separated from loving, from remembering, from voyagin out."---John Taylor, The Antioch Review "A mysterious configuration of presence and absence, Night Journey is an intricate symbolic mapping of identi

Edvard Kocbek was born in 1904, the son of a church organist, in a part of present-day Slovenia that was then in Austria-Hungary. Following the publication in 1934 of his first book of poetry, he published essays that presaged the wartime alliance of this Christian Socialist with the Tito-led partisan resistance. Despite a lengthy postwar publication ban, Kocbek went on to win the Preseren Prize, Slovenia's highest literary award, in 1964. More books of both poetry and prose followed, including his Collected Poems in 1977, which sealed his reputation as Slovenia's greatest modern-day poet. Michael Scammell, who teaches writing in Columbia University's School of the Arts, has translated widely from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian, including works by Tolstoy and Nabokov. Veno Taufer, the author of sixteen volumes of poetry in his native Slovenia and the translator of more than forty books of poetry, is the recipient of the Preseren Prize and several prestigious international awards. His verse, including the collection Waterlings (Northwestern, 2000), has been translated into numerous languages. This is the first comprehensive English-language collection of verse by the most celebrated Slovenian poet of modern times and one of Europe's most notable postwar poets, Edvard Kocbek (1904-1981). The selections introduce the reader to the full spectrum of Kocbek's long and distinguished career, starting with the pantheist and expressionist nature poems of his early period and continuing through the politically engaged poetry written during and after World War II, to the philosophical and metaphysical meditations of his fecund late period. Readers will be struck by the originality and freshness of Kocbek's sinewy and intense vision, rendered into fluid and idiomatic English by two experienced translators. The Slovenian texts appear on the facing pages. The opening stanza of "Moon with a Halo" The man beside me was killed. He had a mother who bore him and a father who made him toys, he had a brother and a playful uncle and a little girl with blond braids, he had a wooden cart and a wooden horse, a trunkful of colored dreams and a brook where he used to fish. "Edvard Kocbek is a major Slovenian poet. For the past few months, I've been carrying around and traveling with Nothing Is Lost, his selected poems eloquently translated by Michael Scammell and Veno Tauffer. This marvelous body of work spans more than 40 years and confirms that Kocbek belongs in the company of other notable East European poets. . . . Reading [his poems] now, one feels that his pastoral sensibility and vital intimacy with nature, which at times feels mystical, were always infused with a painful sense of time, an agonized feeling of cosmic sorrow."---Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Book World "Had Edvard Kocbek not belonged to a small nation and a language of extremely limited diffusion, he would now be numbered among the major poets of the postwar era. This is an extremely valuable book. The translations are impeccable, lucid, and eloquent."-Daniel Weissbort

"Winner of the 2010 TLS Risa Domb/Porjes Translation Prize, Jewish Book Council" "Winner of the 2007 R. R. Hawkins Award, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2007 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Humanities, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2007 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Literature, Language, and Linguistics, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry" "Finalist for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture" "Peter Cole, Recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship" "Peter Cole, Winner of a 2010 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters" Peter Cole is a poet and translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry. He has received numerous awards for his work, including prizes from the Times Literary Supplement and the Modern Language Association, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Winner of the 2004 PEN-America Translation Award, he lives in Jerusalem, where he coedits Ibis Editions. He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2007. Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement." "Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly."---Eric Ormsby, New York Times Book Review "Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb."---Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books "The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization." "...[Cole] has performed an enormous service and produced a book which is by turns moving, charming, and funny. No one after this will be able to write a book on medieval poetry without taking the Hebrew and Arabic poets of Spain into account."---Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement "Meticulously edited and captivating anthology.... [P]oetic scholarship at its best.... [A] major translation project."---Marjorie Perloff, Bookforum "Praise for Peter Cole's Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton):"Cole's translations . . . shimmer: they convey the power and mystique of the original."

Ana Enriqueta Terán is one of Venezuela's best-known poets and has published more than a dozen books of poetry. She was named Doctora Honoris Causa by the University of Carabobo and, in 1989, was awarded her country's highest literary honor, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Now in her eighties, she is writing her autobiography to be published only after her death. Marcel Smith is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He has published translations of Spanish poems in a number of journals. This is his first book. Ana Enriqueta Terán is arguably Venezuela's finest poet. Celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, she is almost unknown among anglophones. Until now only a handful of her poems have been translated into English, giving at best a diluted impression of a uniquely intense imagination. This bilingual edition reveals the power and beauty of this poet's Spanish poems through English versions of corresponding force. It invites readers to enter Terán's world--a world at once strongly Venezuelan and universally human, imbued with great beauty, sardonic humor, pitiless compassion, lucid wisdom, and joyful affirmation. Selected from several volumes of Terán's work, these poems span half a century of composition and show an extraordinary range in both form and substance. Some are written in closed forms, some in free verse. Some are carefully evocative representations of the landscapes and cityscapes that have nourished the poet's intelligence and imagination. Others are dramatic character studies. All are infused with Terán's rare sensibility and realized through language that manages to be at once graceful, urgent, and explosive. This volume is a treasure for all lovers of poetry. Deal Struck with Happiness ? How much sweetness to make right the night and this clutch of anemones near thin smooth consoling stones, stones havens of southern weather. Of a woman who watches Cepheids quaver among lightbursting mangroves. Of a woman who offers cats-eyes and clematis only, Islands, for the sake of setting right her deal struck with happiness. "Startlingly vivid and technically masterful poems, whose range and complexity [have] few equals. . . . [A] fiercely intimate journey contained in a slim but thoughtful volume."---Christine Thomas, American Book Review "The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out . . . is a demanding selection of poems interweaving fables, myths, dreams, bold similes, and heightened visions of reality in order to interpret and commemorate what often nonetheless seem to be personal experiences. It is a sometimes puzzling yet also singularly sensual and resonant mixture, especially in the many cases where poems exhibit a semantically rich, philosophically ambitious, extremely compact lyricism."---John Taylor, Antioch Review "In this attractive anthology, Terán discloses a powerful and grand spirit, whether addressing her mother, her eagle, her rivers, or her dead brother; the idiom varies from the freedoms of early modernism to formal sonnets to the 'old woman's toys' of her final tercets, but the feelings are always dense with loved objects and local solicitude."-Richard Howard "Above all, the poetry of Ana Enriqueta Terán transmits movement and contrasting sound patterns. In his dynamic and often inspired translations, Marcel Smith recovers for us the sprung rhythms and eccentric visual shifts in Terán's poetry. Smith has taken the risky step of translating and transforming to capture an extraordinarily complex and dense poetry, one with few equivalents even in Spanish."-Gwen Kirkpatrick, University of California, Berkeley

Daryl Hine is the author of fourteen collections of original poetry, three plays, a novel, and nonfiction prose, as well as translations from the Greek and Latin classics, including the Homeric Hymns and the works of Theocritus and Ovid. He was editor of Poetry from 1968 to 1978 and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Elegiac lyrics celebrating the love of boys, which the translator terms Puerilities, comprise most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology. That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is brilliantly translated in this, the first complete verse version in English. It is a delightful eroticopia of short poems by great and lesser-known Greek poets, spanning hundreds of years, from ancient times to the late Christian era. The epigrams--wry, wistful, lighthearted, libidinous, and sometimes bawdy--revel in the beauty and fickle affection of boys and young men and in the fleeting joys of older men in loving them. Some, doubtless bandied about in the lax and refined setting of banquets, are translated as limericks. Also included are a few fine and often funny poems about girls and women. Fashion changes in morality as well as in poetry. The sort of attachment that inspired these verses was considered perfectly normal and respectable for over a thousand years. Some of the very best Greek poets--including Strato of Sardis, Theocritus, and Meleager of Gadara--are to be found in these pages. The more than two hundred fifty poems range from the lovely to the playful to the ribald, but all are, as an epigram should be, polished and elegant. The Greek originals face the translations, enhancing the volume's charm. A friend of Youth, I have no youth in mind, For each has beauties, of a different kind. --Strat? I've had enough to drink; my heart and soul As well as tongue are losing self-control. The lamp flame bifurcates; I multiply The dinner guests by two each time I try. Not only shaken up by the wine-waiter, I ogle too the boy who pours the water. --Strat? Venus, denying Cupid is her son, Finds in Antiochus a better one. This is the boy to be enamored of, Boys, a new love superior to Love. --Meleager "Daryl Hine's translations from The Greek Anthology are the liveliest, frequently loveliest, and certainly the most libidinous versions of these celebrated texts that I've ever seen. I know from years of teaching that American students, even of the Classics, are quite vague about what The Greek Anthology was really like-particularly the salacious aspect of those poems. Hine alone gives a fair (or is that foul) sample."-Richard Howard, Columbia University

The description for this book, The Survivors and Other Poems, will be forthcoming.

Xue Tao (A.D. 768-831) was well known as a poet in an age when all men of learning were poets--and almost all women were illiterate. As an entertainer and official government hostess, she met, and impressed, many of the most talented and powerful figures of her day. As a maker of beautiful paper and a Taoist churchwoman, she maintained a life of independence and aesthetic sensibility. As a writer, she crrated a body of work that is by turns deeply moving, amusing, and thought-provoking. Drawing knowledgeably on a rich literary tradition, she created images that here live again for the contemporary reader of English. This bilingual edition contains about two-thirds of Xue Tao's extant poems. The translations are based on accurate readings of the originals and extensive research in both Chinese and Japanese materials. The notes at the end of the book explain allusions and place the poems in the context of medieval Chinese culture and its great literary heritage, while the opening essay introduces Xue Tao's work and describes her unusual life history.

"Winner of the 1998 Poetry in Translation Award, PEN American Center" Eamon Grennan has published three collections of poetry: What Light There Is & Other Poems, As If It Matters, and So It Goes. He has a degree in English and Italian from University College, Dublin, and a doctorate in English from Harvard University. A native of Ireland, he divides his time between there and Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is the Dexer M. Ferry, Jr., Professor of English at Vassar College. These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets. By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti. "[Leopardi's] contribution to 19th-century European poetry second only to Baudelaire's . . . there's plenty to be grateful for in this lucidly translated selection. . ."

Sidney Alexander is the author of fifteen books on Renaissance history and art, as well as novels, poetry, plays, and criticism. The American Literary Translators Association honored his critical edition of The Complete Poems of Michelangelo as the Outstanding Literary Translation of 1991, and his edition of Guicciardini's History of Italy (Princeton paperback) received the PEN Award for Translation in 1970. His other honors include the Maxwell Anderson Award for Dramatic Composition in Verse, and special recognition from the City of Florence for his numerous writings on figures of the Florentine Renaissance. Horace has long been revered as the supreme lyric poet of the Augustan Age. In his perceptive introduction to this translation of Horace's Odes and Satires, Sidney Alexander engagingly spells out how the poet expresses values and traditions that remain unchanged in the deepest strata of Italian character two thousand years later. Horace shares with Italians of today a distinctive delight in the senses, a fundamental irony, a passion for seizing the moment, and a view of religion as aesthetic experience rather than mystical exaltation--in many ways, as Alexander puts it, Horace is the quintessential Italian. The voice we hear in this graceful and carefully annotated translation is thus one that emerges with clarity and dignity from the heart of an unchanging Latin culture. Alexander is an accomplished poet, novelist, biographer, and translator who has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. Translating a poet of such variety and vitality as Horace calls on all his literary abilities. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 bce), was born the son of a freed slave in southern rural Italy and rose to become one of the most celebrated poets in Rome and a confidante of the most powerful figures of the age, including Augustus Caesar. His poetry ranges over politics, the arts, religion, nature, philosophy, and love, reflecting both his intimacy with the high affairs of the Roman Empire and his love of a simple life in the Italian countryside. Alexander translates the diverse poems of the youthful Satires and the more mature Odes with freshness, accuracy, and charm, avoiding affectations of archaism or modernism. He responds to the challenge of rendering the complexities of Latin verse in English with literary sensitivity and a fine ear for the subtleties of poetic rhythm in both languages. This is a major translation of one of the greatest of classical poets by an acknowledged master of his craft. "This new translation promises to be a grand adventure for the imaginations of graduates, undergraduates, and general readers." "Alexander's translations of the satires are unusually readable. . . . They project an image of the poet as a Socratic loner, edgy, irritable, ultimately at odds with the city he loves. . . . But having rendered the satires and the odes in one go, Alexander allows us glimpses of a more subtle Horace."---Tom D'Evelyn, The Boston Book Review "Alexander's translations are accurate yet vigorous and fluent, avoiding both archaisms and contemporary idioms."

Richard Zenith, the author of Pessoa: A Biography, is a prolific translator of Portuguese and Brazilian poets and writers. A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain The rich tradition of troubadour poetry in western Iberia had all but vanished from history until the discovery of several ancient cancioneiros, or songbooks, in the nineteenth century. These compendiums revealed close to 1,700 songs, or cantigas, composed by around 150 troubadours from Galicia, Portugal, and Castile in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In Cantigas, award-winning translator Richard Zenith presents a delightful selection of 124 of these poems in English versions that preserve the musical quality of the originals, which are featured on facing pages. By turns romantic, spiritual, ironic, misogynist, and feminist, these lyrics paint a vibrant picture of their time and place, surprising us with attitudes and behaviors that are both alien and familiar. The book includes the three major kinds of cantigas. While cantigas de amor (love poems in the voice of men) were largely inspired by the troubadour poetry of southern France, cantigas de amigo (love poems voiced by women) derived from a unique native oral tradition in which the narrator pines after her beloved, sings his praises, or mocks him. In turn, cantigas de escárnio are satiric, and sometimes outrageously obscene, lyrics whose targets include aristocrats, corrupt clergy, promiscuous women, and homosexuals. Complete with an illuminating introduction on the history of the cantigas, their poetic characteristics, and the men who composed and performed them, this engaging volume is filled with exuberant and unexpected poems. "These cantigas, in Zenith's hands, remind me that a poetry's message is its music."---Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's "Zenith helps provide a roadmap to appreciate some of the idiosyncratic aspects of the medieval language while also allowing himself the freedom to interpret the cantigas without a priority for overly literal translation. . . . Zenith's phrasing conveys the love-sickness, anguish, jealousy, danger and fear that pulse through the original poems."---Jacob Abell, Reading in Translation "Delightful. . . . A bilingual volume that reveals an intriguing world of courtly love and satire in medieval Portugal and Spain." "Zenith is to be congratulated for an authoritative, attractive and highly readable presentation of these songs to a twenty-first-century anglophone audience."---David Frier, Times Literary Supplement " This edition will bring this considerably large lyric corpus to the attention of a much wider circle of readers. It is a volume that deserves to be in the library of every medievalist."---Josiah Blackmore, Speculum "Cantigas opens a new vista onto a famous European poetic tradition. Richard Zenith's introduction is a rich trove of history and insight, and his translations are revelations in terms of how deftly they capture the lyrical combination of verbal artistry and incantatory resonance."-John Keene, translator of Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer "Translated with elegance and wit, Cantigas is a brilliant accomplishment. Richard Zenith is the most celebrated and versatile translator from Portuguese working today."-Anna M. Klobucka, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

"Shortlisted for the John Florio Prize, The Society of Authors" Taije Silverman teaches poetry and literary translation at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of the poetry collection Houses Are Fields. Marina Della Putta Johnston is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Pennsylvania. The most comprehensive collection in English of the founder of modern Italian poetry Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)-the founder of modern Italian poetry and one of Italy's most beloved poets-has been compared to Robert Frost for his evocation of natural speech, his bucolic settings, and the way he bridges poetic tradition and the beginnings of modernism. Featuring verse from throughout his career, and with the original Italian on facing pages, Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of a fascinating and major literary figure. Reading this poet of nature, grief, and small-town life is like traveling through Italy's landscapes in his footsteps-from Romagna and Bologna to Rome, Sicily, and Tuscany-as the country transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Mixing the elevated diction of Virgil with local slang and the sounds of the natural world, these poems capture sense-laden moments: a train's departure, a wren's winter foraging, and the lit windows of a town at dusk. Incorporating revolutionary language into classical scenes, Pascoli's poems describe ancient rural dramas-both large and small-that remain contemporary. Framed by an introduction, annotations, and a substantial chronology, Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston's translations render the variety, precision, and beauty of Pascoli's poetry with a profoundly current vision. "A welcome addition to Princeton University Press's excellent series, the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation."---David Cooke, Modern Poetry in Translation "Italian modernist poetry begins not, as everywhere else, in the anonymous city, but in the lore, sights, and especially the sounds of Giovanni Pascoli's peasant village. The closely perceived local becomes, without rhetorical flourishes, the universal, and in this brilliant translation yesterday's Italian becomes today's American English."-Eliot Weinberger "This is a lyrical and learned introduction to one of modern Italy's essential poets. The quiet openness and aesthetic finesse of Pascoli's 'little' poems sound far truer to us today than the ringing odes of his near-contemporaries Carducci and D'Annunzio. It is Pascoli, in the end, who speaks to us most hauntingly and memorably. Silverman and Johnston have brought him wonderfully alive for contemporary readers."-Jonathan Galassi "This sensitive translation makes accessible to a new audience of English-language readers a body of work that often has the beautiful, lucid simplicity and compelling complexity of haiku, while capturing the mysterious depths of loss, longing, and evil. This exquisitely crafted bilingual volume is a gift to all who cherish the renewal of perception and understanding of our shared humanity, which only the great poets, like Pascoli, can provide."-Rebecca West, University of Chicago "What a marvelous book! Here at long last is a true rendering of the first modern in Italian poetry, a quiet foundational figure poised between centuries, a secret force akin to Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. These translations of Giovanni Pascoli shine with the tears of things."-Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem

"Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN America" "Ottilie Mulzet, Winner of the Tibor Déry Prize, Tibor Déry Foundation" Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) wrote in a wide variety of genres. His books include the novel The Dispossessed and the poetry collection Berlin-Hamlet. Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and the translator of The Dispossessed and Berlin-Hamlet, among other books. Her translation of the novel Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai won the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. She lives in Prague. An award-winning translator presents selections from the haunting final volumes of a leading voice in contemporary Hungarian poetry Szilárd Borbély, one of the most celebrated writers to emerge from post-Communist Hungary, received numerous literary awards in his native country. In this volume, acclaimed translator Ottilie Mulzet reveals the full range and force of Borbély's verse by bringing together generous selections from his last two books, Final Matters and To the Body. The original Hungarian text is set on pages facing the English translations, and the book also features an afterword by Mulzet that places the poems in literary, historical, and biographical context. Restless, curious, learned, and alert, Borbély weaves into his work an unlikely mix of Hungarian folk songs, Christian and Jewish hymns, classical myths, police reports, and unsettling accounts of abortions. In her afterword, Mulzet calls this collection "a blasphemous and fragmentary prayer book … that challenges us to rethink the boundaries of victimhood, culpability, and our own religious and cultural definitions." "Any reader will find a mine full of treasure within Final Matters, and every reader of poetry should have a copy of this excellent translation of Borbély's masterful work."---Bruce Arlen Wasserman, New York Journal of Books "The poetry of Final Matters is a tremendous achievement, and shows that Borbély should be considered not just among the great writers of post-Soviet Europe, but also of contemporary Judaism."---Daniel Kraft, Jewish Currents "Final Matters is Borbely's 'painted bleeding'; the poetic craft and rhetorical strategies employed in the collection allow him to keep hidden the unspeakable personal trauma whilst at the same time revealing the questions this and other such acts of extreme violence ask of us all. . . . At times, Borbely devastates, but the material is never gratuitous, however heartbreaking: and there is always, somewhere, a shred of faith, of hope, hard won-he is a poet who writes against oblivion."---Tony Flynn, High Window "The title of this book gives a powerful clue as to its contents. For what Szilárd Borbély has given us here is a book of death. In line after line of spare and devastating poetry, he goes into the heart of darkness, and invites us, with an eery calm, to go there with him. Once you have done so, you will not be the same again."---Barney Bardsley, Hungarian Literature Online "Ottilie Mulzet . . . [is] the translator of Final Matters: ­Selected Poems, 2004-2010 by Szilárd Borbély. Borbély's mother was murdered by a couple of crazed robbers. Some poems work through that tragedy toward a larger meditation on death and life. In others, with startling ­images drawn from documentary materials, Borbély writes mystical lyrics, polytheistic parables and Hasidic sequences too powerful to forget. Like Japan's wondrous Motoyuki Shibata, ­Ottilie Mulzet has become a translator with a following. I'm one of those committed to reading anything she takes up."---Forrest Gander, Wall Street Journal "[Final Matters by Szilárd Borbély and translated by Ottie Mulzet] is stirring and unlike any other book I have read, and the bilingual format is important - as it preserves the original Hungarian, and fights against the trend of making it seem like all literature is written in English . . . Mulzet has undoubtedly brought readers a great gift by br

"Selected as One of the Top 10 Poetry Books of Spring 2020 by Publisher's Weekly" Stephanie Burt is a poet and critic and professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include Don't Read Poetry, Advice from the Lights: Poems, and the essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. She serves as poetry coeditor for the Nation. Mark Payne is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, The Animal Part, and Hontology. Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie Burt Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Greeks and Romans, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt's attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today's poetry readers. Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first-century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus's whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context. After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation. "The delightful fifth book from poet and critic Burt brings the ancient poet Callimachus, respected by later Greeks and Romans, to 21st-century audiences. Burt's contemporary translations and adaptations musically and playfully build on Callimachus's themes . . . Burt engages deeply and originally with Callimachus, and the result is a wonderfully rich collection that reveals how the past can cast new light on the present." "Burt's translations and adaptations of the works of the ancient Greek poet Callimachus introduce new readers to the poet's lyric writing, whose topics range from sex and gender to technology. Modern readers will find this voice stirring and relevant to the 21st century." "I've savored in spurts a couple of the many fine books of poems out this spring-among them, After Callimachus, by Stephanie Burt, which reimagines a campy version of a real but ancient Greek poet."---Tess Taylor, CNN.com "With consummate skill and considerable powers of invention, Stephanie Burt has taken an imaginative leap which enables those who read her to gain some insight into an unfamiliar world and which, at the same time, may tell them much about their own. [After Callimachus is] a collection that deserves to be widely read."---David Cooke, The High Window "After Callimachus is a substantial, fresh and entertaining collection, and a fine work of translation."---David Caddy, Tears in the Fence ​​​​​​​ "There is nothing like this book. No other poet that I know of has attempted to reenvision Callimachus in modern dress. With an urbane wit and a sense of fun, enlivened with sensibilities from our

"Winner of the 1997 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, American Academy of Poets" David Hinton has translated six volumes of Chinese poetry, including The Selected Poems of Tu Fu and The Selected Poems of Li Po. He has earned wide critical acclaim for creating compelling English poems that alter our conception of Chinese poetry. By translating such an unusual body of work, he adds dramatic new breadth to the Chinese tradition in English. Late in life, Meng Chiao (A.D. 751--814) developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This is truly major work-- work that may be the most radical in the Chinese tradition. And though written more than a thousand years ago, it is remarkably fresh and contemporary. But, in spite of Meng's significance, this is the first volume of his poetry to appear in English. Until the age of forty, Meng Chiao lived as a poet-recluse associated with Ch'an (Zen) poet-monks in south China. He then embarked on a rather unsuccessful career as a government official. Throughout this time, his poetry was decidedly mediocre, conventional verse inevitably undone by his penchant for the strange and surprising. After his retirement, Meng developed the innovative poetry translated in this book. His late work is singular not only for its bleak introspection and "avant-garde" methods, but also for its dimensions: in a tradition typified by the short lyric poem, this work is made up entirely of large poetic sequences. "These poems defy 'commentary.' They are so lovely, lush, and intense that they simply must be experienced. Meng Chiao's poems are deeply personal but not obscure, because the field of introspection is the landscape. . . . The sometimes surrealistic language is vital and powerful, lyric and soulful. This is the first volume of Meng Chiao's poetry to appear in English, and considering how many years ago he lived, the pleasure is long overdue. Don't miss the book." "The translation is outstanding. David Hinton is simply the best translator of Chinese poetry presently working in English. This is a very intelligently selected group of poems from an important Chinese poet. Hinton reads deeply and with great sensitivity to nuance."-J.P. Seaton, University of North Carolina "David Hinton's translations, while remaining faithful to the meaning and spirit of the original, are consistently imaginative in language and effective as English poetry, and he has shown a remarkable skill in capturing the particular style and voice of the different poets he has tackled."-Burton Watson

Michael Sells is the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many translations and studies of classical Arabic poetry. A masterpiece of Arabic love poetry in a new and complete English translation The Translator of Desires, a collection of sixty-one love poems, is the lyric masterwork of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240 CE), one of the most influential writers of classical Arabic and Islamic civilization. In this authoritative volume, Michael Sells presents the first complete English translation of this work in more than a century, complete with an introduction, commentary, and a new facing-page critical text of the original Arabic. While grounded in an expert command of the Arabic, this verse translation renders the poems into a natural, contemporary English that captures the stunning beauty and power of Ibn 'Arabi's poems in such lines as "A veiled gazelle's / an amazing sight, / her henna hinting, / eyelids signalling // A pasture between / breastbone and spine / Marvel, a garden / among the flames!" The introduction puts the poems in the context of the Arabic love poetry tradition, Ibn 'Arabi's life and times, his mystical thought, and his "romance" with Niẓām, the young woman whom he presents as the inspiration for the volume-a relationship that has long fascinated readers. Other features, following the main text, include detailed notes and commentaries on each poem, translations of Ibn 'Arabi's important prefaces to the poems, a discussion of the sources used for the Arabic text, and a glossary. Bringing The Translator of Desires to life for contemporary English readers as never before, this promises to be the definitive volume of these fascinating and compelling poems for years to come. "Michael Sells, a highly regarded expert on the history and literature of Islam, and translator of this splendid book, provides all we might need to understand the poems in their broader historical context. . . . It is the clarity of his translations that bring these poems back for us, their marvels intact."---Allan Graubard, American Book Review "Michael Sells has produced a book of glories, poems like dry stones in reflecting water. This collection is both a visual experience for one who can't read Arabic and a deep literary thrill for one who can open to these translations. The threads of Quranic sound are spread in patches on the pages. Here we see fulfilled a poetics of bewilderment. Without desire, where would the future be?"-Fanny Howe, author of Love and I: Poems "Accurate yet not overawed by the Arabic texts, this authoritative translation renders Ibn 'Arabi's Translator of Desires into a nuanced, flexible, and accessible modern idiom that enables English readers to enjoy the delights of these poetic gems."-James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge

Fabio Pusterla is a prolific poet, essayist, and translator, most notably of the work of Philippe Jaccottet. His honors include the Swiss Schiller Prize, the Gottfried Keller-Preis, and the Premio Napoli for lifetime achievement. Will Schutt is the author of Westerly, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and translator of My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti, among other works from Italian. For his translations of Fabio Pusterla's poetry he received the Raiziss/de Palchi Award from the Academy of American Poets. Award-winning new translations of a major contemporary Italian poet Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems collects forty-five poems by Fabio Pusterla, one of the most distinguished Italian-language poets writing today. Born in Switzerland and resident in Italy, Pusterla engages the pressing moral concerns of his age and excavates the hidden realities of our concrete world. These are poems of disquieting Alpine landscapes and rift zones, filled with curious fauna, lanced with troubling memories, built "from the bottom, from the margins, from outside" the mainstream. Pusterla is the author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry and has received several major literary prizes. Selected and translated by Will Schutt, himself an award-winning poet, this volume draws from Pusterla's six most recent collections to capture a wide range of the poet's work. With English translations and Italian originals on facing pages, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems deftly introduces one of Europe's most ambitious, imaginative, and humane poets to English-speaking readers. "The skillfully translated first English-language edition of Pusterla's work spans landscapes, memories, dreams, wars, and the ordinariness of daily life, energetically rendering a voice of striking attention, one willing to notice near-constant juxtaposition. . . . Pusterla's voice is a kindly light in the midst of darkness." "As with Leopardi, in spite of the poet's despair, it is the poetry that brings its own consolation. No doubt Pusterla would agree with W.H. Auden that, as a poet, all he has is a voice or, to quote his own beautifully cadenced and defiant words at the end of 'Landscape': 'E le parole: nessuno adesso me le ruberà,'/ 'And words: now no one will rob me of them.'"---David Cooke, The High Window "Pusterla has long been one of the most singular and intriguing poets writing in Italian. I've admired his work for decades now, and I'm delighted to have, at last-thanks to translator Will Schutt, a brilliant poet in his own right, who prefaces his resonant versions with a stellar introduction-a volume in English that does justice to Pusterla's 'wayfaring' voice and 'rift zone' vision."-Geoffrey Brock, editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology "Pusterla's vision is like mountain air. That way of seeing, neither sentimental nor heartless, comes across in Schutt's clear-eyed translations of Pusterla's masterful and often intricately detailed poems."-Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry: Poems and Dailiness: Essays on Poetry

George Savidis (1929–1995) was professor of modern Greek at the University of Thessaloniki and George Seferis Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Edmund Keeley (1928–2022) was the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, emeritus, and professor emeritus of creative writing at Princeton University. Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) was research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and lecturer in the history of the Orthodox Church at King's College London. C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. Here is an extensively revised edition of the acclaimed translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, which capture Cavafy's mixture of formal and idiomatic use of language and preserve the immediacy of his frank treatment of homosexual themes, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. The resetting of the entire edition has permitted the translators to review each poem and to make alterations where appropriate. George Savidis has revised the notes according to his latest edition of the Greek text. "The best [English version] we are likely to see for some time."-James Merrill, New York Review of Books "[Keeley and Sherrard] have managed the miracle of capturing this elusive, inimitable, unforgettable voice. It is the most haunting voice I know in modern poetry."-Walter Kaiser, New Republic "Among the key books of our century and should be read by anyone who cares for poetry."-Washington Post Book World

Translated and Introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire Regarded as one of the best representatives since World War II of the rich and ancient art of poetry in Poland, Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is, in the translators' words, "that rarest of phenomena: a serious poet who commands a large audience in her native land." The seventy poems in this bilingual edition are among the largest and most representative offering of her work in English, with particular emphasis on the period since 1967. They illustrate virtually all her major themes and most of her important techniques. Describing Szymborka's poetry, Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire write that her verse is marked by high seriousness, delightful inventiveness, a prodigal imagination, and enormous technical skill. She writes of the diversity, plenitude, and richness of the world, taking delight in observing and naming its phenomena. She looks on with wonder, astonishment, and amusement, but almost never with despair. "[Szymborska] is like so many Eastern European writers, an ironist. She writes, especially in her later years, a plain, almost bony verse, and she can stand for the survival, not just of the conscience but of imagination, in this last half-century."

Karl Kirchwey is professor of the arts and director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College, and, from 2010-2013, the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. For many years he was director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. His six books of poetry include The Happiness of This World and Mount Lebanon. The first complete English edition of Verlaine's important first book of poems Poems Under Saturn is the first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet of promise and originality, one who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection's heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. Restoring frequently anthologized poems to the context in which they originally appeared, Poems Under Saturn testifies to the blazing talents for which Verlaine is celebrated. The poems display precocious virtuosity, mingling the attractions of the flesh with the longings of the spirit. Greek and Hindu myth give way to intimate erotic meditations and wickedly satirical society portraits, mythological landscapes alternate with gritty narratives of mid-nineteenth century Paris, visions of happiness yield to nightmarish glimpses of deep alienation, and real and imaginary characters-including Achilles, Valmiki, Charlemagne, and Spain's baleful King Philip II-all figure as the subject matter of a supremely ambitious young poet. Poems Under Saturn presents the extraordinary devotion and intense musicality of an artist for whom poetry remained the one true passion. "A deftly rhymed and metered new translation."---Lydia Davis, New York Times Book Review "Karl Kirchwey achieves some masterful effects in his translation of Verlaine's large collection Poems Under Saturn. . . . Kirchwey can be wonderfully accurate in rendering the meaning of Verlaine's words and is very sensitive to the rhythm of the lines. His translation of the final stanza of 'Evening Star' is remarkable: The barn owls awaken and, silent / Oar the black air with their heavy wings / And the zenith fills with dull glimmerings. / Pale Venus rises, and it is night. Using 'oar' as a verb is a touch of genius and enlivens the verse." "Karl Kirchwey's translations of early Verlaine are true to the emotional coloring and musicality of the originals, their Baudelairean ambiguities of feeling, their exciting mixture of dictions. 'Classic Walpurgisnacht' is one of many renderings which seem to me masterly."-Richard Wilbur, author of Collected Poems, 1943-2004 "Beautifully attentive to Verlaine's moods and melodies, Kirchwey catches the harmonies and dissonances, the tenderness, bile, and rage, of Verlaine's astonishing first book of poems. With its learned introduction and notes, this translation is a work of art of the first order: a perfect introduction to the young Verlaine for readers who do not know French, and a graceful meditation on Verlaine's poetics for readers who have long known and loved the poems in the original."-Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems "In these Poems Under Saturn, Verlaine's early 'self I was then' springs out strangely and inventively. Yet they feel like now."-Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry "This is a historical event in the translation of lyric verse-the first valuable English version of Paul Verlaine's first and best book."-Richard Howard, author of Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 "Attentive both to precise and shaded meanings, Kirchwey's careful translations find the true Verlaine in verse respectful of the original rhyme schemes."-Martin Sorrell, University of Exeter