Shakespeare's Sonnets by
Along with writing comedic and dramatic plays, William Shakespeare was also a master poet. Using the sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter), he composed 154 poems covering timeless themes of love, beauty, and mortality. The poems' subjects--the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet--have become nearly as famous as the sonnets themselves. While not the first to write poems in sonnet form, Shakespeare's sonnets are considered the most influential examples of this style. The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto; this is an unabridged collection of all of Shakespeare's iconic sonnets, including Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments"), and Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun").
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads by
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside occupies a distinctive and somewhat notorious place within George Meredith’s already unique body of work. Modern Love is now best known for the emotionally intense sonnet cycle which Meredith’s own contemporaries dismissed as scandalously confessional and indiscreet. While individual sonnets from the work have been anthologized, the complete cycle is rarely included, and the original edition has not been reprinted since its first appearance in 1862. This edition restores the original publication and supplements it with a range of accompanying materials that will reintroduce Meredith’s astonishing collection of poetry to a new generation of readers.
The Bronte Sisters by
Although the Brontës have long fascinated readers of fiction and biography, their poetry was all too little known until this pioneering selection by Stevie Davies, the novelist and critic. Charlotte (1816-1855) is certainly a competent poet, and Anne (1820-1849) developed a distinctive voice, while Emily (1818-1848) is one of the great women poets in English. Read together with their novels, the poems movingly elucidate the ideas around which the narratives revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions of the sisters' personalities: Emily's rebelliousness, for example, is counterbalanced here by great tenderness. This selection of over seventy poems gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling within each author's work, and of the way in which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each other.
Tudor Verse Satire by
This volume brings together examples of English verse satire written during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, interpreting satire widely to include reflective poems modelled on Horace, 'aggressive' poems modelled on Juvenal, and poems in the native or medieval tradition. There are substantial extracts from the anonymous Cock Lorell's Boat, Skelton's Colin Clout and Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale, but most poems are given complete. Among other poets represented are Wyatt, Donne, Marston and Jonson and a number of pieces have been included by writers whose work is today not readily accessible, such as Gascoigne, Lodge, Rowlands and Guilpin. The nature and development of verse satire as a literary genre is discussed in the introduction.
The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley by
Writing to his publisher in 1813, Shelley expressed the hope that two of his major works "should form one volume"; nearly two centuries later, the second volume of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry fulfills that wish for the first time. This volume collects two important pieces: Queen Mab and The Esdaile Notebook. Privately issued in 1813, Queen Mab was perhaps Shelley's most intellectually ambitious work, articulating his views of science, politics, history, religion, society, and individual human relations. Subtitled A Philosophical Poem: With Notes, it became his most influential?and pirated?poem during much of the nineteenth century, a favorite among reformers and radicals. The Esdaile Notebook, a cycle of fifty-eight early poems, exhibits an astonishing range of verse forms. Unpublished until 1964, this sequence is vital in understanding how the poet mastered his craft. As in the acclaimed first volume, these works have been critically edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. The poems are presented as Shelley intended, with textual variants included in footnotes. Following the poems are extensive discussions of the circumstances of their composition and the influences they reflect; their publication or circulation by other means; their reception at the time of publication and in the decades since; their re-publication, both authorized and unauthorized; and their place in Shelley's intellectual and aesthetic development.
Wordsworth and Coleridge by
When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to that which had been voiced before. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original contexts as they appeared to Coleridge¿s and Wordsworth¿s contemporaries, and includes some of their most famous poems, including Coleridge¿s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.
Complete Poetry and Prose by
Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.
Lancelot by
In this outstanding new translation of Lancelot, Burton Raffel brings to English language readers the fourth of Chrétien's five surviving romantic Arthurian poems. This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur legend.
Sonnets of Louise Labe by
The love sonnets of Louise Lab of Lyons and the gilded legend of her life in the early years of the French Renaissance have appealed to the imagination of four centuries. Printed here beside the text of the 1556 edition, the translations of the sonnets by Alta Lind Cook follow closely the original version and admirably retain its sweep and movement, its simplicity and melody. The rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet has been preserved with variations and corresponding to those of the French. With the poems, the translator presents a sketch of the circumstances and background of this unique literary figure of the Sixteenth Century, known in France and outside of France as La Belle Cordi re. These translations by Alta Lind Cook are fine poetry; in English as in French the reader finds "present reality in their hope and their despair, their independence and their impertinence, their tears and their sparkle."
The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry by
Not since the publication of Paul Auster's The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1984) has there been a significant and widely read anthology of modern French poetry in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary verse of scourge Michel Houellebecq. Many of the English translations (on facing pages) are justly celebrated, composed by eminent figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery; many others are new and have been commissioned for this book. Distinguished scholar and editor Mary Ann Caws has chosen work by more than 100 poets. Her deliberately extensive, international selection includes work by Francophone poets, by writers better known for accomplishments in other genres (novelists, songwriters, performance artists), and by many more female poets than have typically been represented in past anthologies of modern French poetry. The editor has opted for a chronological organisation that highlights six crucial pressur
After Every War by
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.
Das Nibelungenlied by
No poem in German literature is so well known and studied in Germany and Europe as the 800-year-old Das Nibelungenlied. In the English-speaking world, however, the poem has remained little known, languishing without an adequate translation. This wonderful new translation by eminent translator Burton Raffel brings the epic poem to life in English for the first time, rendering it in verse that does full justice to the original High Middle German. His translation underscores the formal aspects of the poem and preserves its haunting beauty. Often called the German lliad, Das Nibelungenlied is a heroic epic both national in character and sweeping in scope. The poem moves inexorably from romance through tragedy to holocaust. It portrays the existential struggles and downfall of an entire people, the Burgundians, in a military conflict with the Huns and their king. In his foreword to the book, Michael Dirda observes that the story "could be easily updated to describe the downfall of a Mafia crime family, something like The Godfather, with swords.” The tremendous appeal of Das Nibelungenlied throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is reflected in such works as Richard Wagner’s opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, Fritz Lang’s two-part film Die Nibelungen, and, more recently, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
German Verse from the 12th to the 20th Century in English Translation by
This anthology presents in English verse translation a selection of the best of German poetry, together with discussions of the chief authors and literary periods and brief explications of the individual poems. Taking the reader from the Minnesingers' songs of courtly love to Goethe and Rilke, this volume gives an excellent introduction to eight centuries of German poetry.
The Nibelungenlied by
The Nibelungenlied, translated as The Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem in Middle High German. The story tells of dragon-slayer Siegfried at the court of the Burgundians, how he was murdered, and of his wife Kriemhild's revenge. The Nibelungenlied is based on pre-Christian Germanic heroic motifs (the "Nibelungensaga"), which include oral traditions and reports based on historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries. Old Norse parallels of the legend survive in the V�lsunga saga, the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, the Legend of Norna-Gest, and the �i�rekssaga. In 2009, the three main manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of their historical significance.
Light Within the Shade by
The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country's cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors' vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, the poems are followed by an essay by Ozsv‡th providing the historical, biographical, and cultural background of the poets and the poetry. The book concludes with Turner's essay on the special thematic and literary qualities of Hungarian poetry, as well as notes on translation practices. This essential volume exposes English-speaking readers to Hungarian poetry's artistic achievement in history and culture, its evolutionary development as a tradition, and its significance within the context of world literature.
The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe by
Mary Blachford Tighe was born in Dublin in 1772 and became a poet by the age of seventeen. Her enormously popular 1805 epic poem "Psyche; or, The Legend of Love" made her a fixture of English literary history for much of the nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, however, Tighe was better known for her influence on Keats's poetry than the considerable merits of her own work. The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe restores Tighe to the general canon of English literature of the period. With over eighty-five poems, including the complete Psyche, and extracts from several journals, both by and about Tighe, Harriet Kramer Linkin's annotated edition is the most complete collection of Mary Tighe's work to be published in one volume.
The Pop-Up Book of Invasions by
Offering poems that draw vividly on the landscape, history, and mythology of Ireland--while making connections with her home and childhood--this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey and the many "invasions" of past and present. She adapts and transforms several ancient Irish texts, rewriting their stories for a contemporary world.
Selected Poems by
This book is a selection of the best of Gabriel Rosenstock's poetry, with English translations by Paddy Bushe.
The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte by
Though his name might not be familiar to many twenty-first century readers, Laurence Whyte (d.1753) is an important missing link in eighteenth-century Ireland's literary and musical histories. A rural poet who established himself in Dublin as a teacher of mathematics and as an active member (and poetic chronicler) of the much admired and supported Charitable Musical Society, Whyte was a poet of considerable talent and dexterity, and his body of work yields a wealth of insight into the intersecting cultures of his time and place. Published in 1740 and 1742, Whyte's writing, by turns humorous and poignant, insightful and nostalgic, straddled the worlds of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, of the rural midlands and the capital, of Catholic and Protestant. Some of the dualities explored in his verse were present, to varying extents, in the work of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. In matters poetical, political and cultural, Whyte is an important, though as yet neglected and unstudied, figure. This edition, comprehensively introduced and annotated, retrieves him from that neglect.
Postcolonial Overtures by
Postcolonial Overtures explores the importance of sound in contemporary Northern Irish writing, focusing on the work of three canonical poets: Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. Obert argues that these poets respond to what Edward Said calls ""geographical violence""-to the stratification of the North's visual spaces; to the sectarian symbols splashed across Belfast and beyond-by turning from the eye to the ear, tentatively remapping place in acoustic space. Carson, for instance, casts Troubles-era Belfast as a ""demolition city,"" its landmarks ""swallowed in the maw of time and trouble,"" and tries to compensate for this inhospitality by reimagining landscape as soundscape, an immersive auditory field. This strategy suggests sound's political and affective potential: music, accent, and even comfortingly familiar white noise can help subjects, otherwise unmoored, feel at home. Drawing on a diverse range of fields, Obert devotes two chapters to the examination of each poet's work, allowing room for both in-depth formalist readings and contextual and theoretical understandings of the poems and their reverberating effects.
The poems of W. B. Yeats. Volume one, 1882-1889 by
In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. This first volume collects Yeats’s poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically-inflected early work like ‘The Island of Statues’ is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-epic ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. In Yeats’s work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet’s youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats’s emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences – including, significantly, the Anglo-Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeats’s developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Yeats’s poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail. -- Provided by publisher.
A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation by
Provides a bilingual collection of ninety-two poems by thirty-five Italian poets, including works of classicism and passionate decadentism, examples of crepuscularism What was Italian poetry like in the years of extraordinary historical, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual change between the 1860s and the Unification of Italy in the 1960s? In A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation Roberta Payne provides a bilingual collection of ninety-two poems by thirty-five Italian poets, including works of classicism and passionate decadentism, examples of crepuscularism, and poetry by Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo. Payne pays particular attention to poets of the fifties and sixties, futurists, and female poets. She notes that the futurists, who have rarely been translated, were particularly important as they were truly original, attempting to develop new notions of word, line, sound, and phrase. Such new notions make translating them particularly challenging. Containing the original Italian and the translation side-by-side, this volume offers a wonderful introduction to Italian poetry to scholars and general readers alike.
Dante's Inferno by
Inferno is the first part of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's epic poem Divine Comedy. The allegory describes Dante's journey through the depths of Hell. He is led by the Roman poet Virgil down into the nine circles of Hell, each of which holds and punishes progressively worse sinners. From the First Circle, where unbaptized souls live in peaceful limbo, down to the Ninth Circle, where Satan is trapped in ice, Dante sees firsthand the consequence of unrepentantly sinning against God. Dante published his narrative poem between 1308 and 1321. This version is taken from an 1892 English edition, featuring British author Rev. H. F. Cary's blank verse translation and woodcut illustrations by French artist Gustave Doré.
Floridoro by
The first original chivalric poem written by an Italian woman, Floridoro imbues a strong feminist ethos into a hypermasculine genre. Dotted with the usual characteristics--dark forests, illusory palaces, enchanted islands, seductive sorceresses--Floridoro is the story of the two greatest knights of a bygone age: the handsome Floridoro, who risks everything for love, and the beautiful Risamante, who helps women in distress while on a quest for her inheritance. Throughout, Moderata Fonte (1555-92) vehemently defends women's capacity to rival male prowess in traditionally male-dominated spheres. And her open criticism of women's lack of education is echoed in the plights of various female characters who must depend on unreliable men. First published in 1581, Floridoro remains a vivacious and inventive narrative by a singular poet.
Orlando Furioso by
The appearance of David R. Slavittâe(tm)s translation of Orlando Furioso (âeoeMad Orlandoâe), one of the great literary achievements of the Italian Renaissance, is a publishing event. With this lively new verse translation, Slavitt introduces readers to Ariostoâe(tm)s now neglected masterpieceâe"a poem whose impact on Western literature can scarcely be exaggerated. It was a major influence on Spenserâe(tm)s Faerie Queene. William Shakespeare borrowed one of its plots. Voltaire called it the equal of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote combined. More recently, Italo Calvino drew inspiration from it. Borges was a fan. Now, through translations of generous selections from this longest of all major European poems, Slavitt brings the poem to life in ways previous translators have not.At the heart of Ariostoâe(tm)s romance are Orlandoâe(tm)s unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica and his jealous rage when she elopes. The action takes place against a besieged Paris, as Charlemagne and his Christian paladins defend the city against the Saracen king. The poem, however, obeys no geography or rules but its own, as the story moves by whim from Japan to the Hebrides to the moon; it includes such imaginary creatures as the hippogriff and a sea monster called the orc.Orlando Furioso is Danteâe(tm)s medieval universe turned upside down and made comic. Characterized by satire, parody, and irony, the poem celebrates a new humanistic Renaissance conception of man in an utterly fantastical world. Slavittâe(tm)s translation captures the energy, comedy, and great fun of Ariostoâe(tm)s Italian.
The Songs of Anto´nio Botto by
Antnio Botto was one of Portugal's first openly gay writers, a po te maudit whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled when they appeared in Portuguese in 1922 under the title Can Aes . Botto's poetic voice-confessional, personal, and intimate-revels and luxuriates in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Yet for all of his acclaim and notoriety-he was both hailed as one of the great poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male-male desire-Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death. The Songs of Antnio Botto recovers this important, urgent voice in modern poetry by making available-for the first time since its private publication in 1948-the English-language translation of Can Aes that Botto's friend and artistic collaborator, Fernando Pessoa, completed in 1933. Pessoa, Portugal's preeminent modernist literary figure, considered Botto the only Portuguese poet worthy of the label aesthete and, as a critic and publisher, championed his work. Featuring an introduction to Botto's work and Pessoa's previously unpublished foreword to the 1948 edition as well as a new translation of Botto's 1941 elegy to Pessoa, The Songs of Antnio Botto establishes Botto as a pioneering figure in modern gay literature and places him alongside C. P. Cavafy and Federico Garc a Lorca as one of the major poetic voices of the twentieth century."
Songs of a Friend by
Portugal enjoyed one of the richest and most sophisticated cultures of the Middle Ages, in part because of its vibrant secular literature. One popular literary genre of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the cantigas de amigo, love songs in which male poets wrote from a female perspective. More than five hundred of these mysterious poems depicting a young girl's love for an absent lover survive today. Until now, however, they have remained inaccessible except to a small circle of scholars. In her translation of nearly one hundred representative examples of the cantigas de amigo, Barbara Hughes Fowler recovers the beauty of these poems for the modern reader. Her accurate and elegant renderings capture the charming spontaneity of the lyrics and show them to be a uniquely appealing form of medieval literature. (excerpt of one of the poems) Lovely mother, I saw my friend but did not speak with him and so I lost him, but now I'm dying of love for him. I did not speak because of my disdain; I'm dying, mother, for love of him.
Selected Sonnets by
The most important writer in Portuguese history and one of the preeminent European poets of the early modern era, Luís de Camões (1524-80) has been ranked as a sonneteer on par with Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare. Championed by such influential English poets as William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and admired in America by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, Camões was renowned for his intensely personal sonnets and equally intense adventurous life. He was banished for dueling and brawling at court, lost an eye fighting the Moors in North Africa, was shipwrecked off the coast of India, jailed in Goa, and exiled in Mozambique. Throughout these personal trials, he advanced poetry beyond the Petrarchin model of love won and lost to write of personal despair, history, politics, war, religion, and the natural beauty of Portugal. The first significant English translation of Camões's sonnets in more than one hundred years, Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition collects seventy of Camões's best--all musically rendered into contemporary, yet metrical and rhymed, English-language poetry by William Baer, with the original Portuguese on facing pages--and reintroduces the genius of a poet whom Cervantes called "the incomparable treasure of Lusus." A comprehensive selection of sonnets that demonstrates the full range of Camões's interests and invention, Selected Sonnets will prove indespensible for both students and teachers in comparative and Renaissance literature, Portuguese and Spanish history, and the art of literary translation.
Poems and Prose of Mihai Eminescu by
This new edition of poems and prose by Mihai Eminescu commemorates the 130th anniversary of the death of Romania's national poet. This book includes a selection of the best English-language renditions of poems and prose by this remarkable cultural figure of the nineteenth-century, whom the British writer George Bernard Shaw once referred to as "the Moldavian who raised the XVIII-XIX fin de siècle from its grave." It is undeniable that to have an appreciation of Romanian culture one must become acquainted with the works of Mihai Eminescu. The leading cultural figure of nineteenth century Romania, Eminescu (1850-1889) was not only a poet, but also a philosopher, prose writer, translator, and journalist. The selections in this volume include English language versions of some of Eminescu's best-known poems such as Doina, Lacul, ?i daca, Luceafarul, Oda (în metru antic), Mai am un singur dor, Scrisoarea III, and many others. It also includes English versions of his most important prose writings. This beautiful, deluxe volume also includes an introduction on the life and work of Eminescu by A.K. Brackob and original artwork by Ioana Lupu?oru.
When Angels Sing by
Magda Isanos (1916-1944) ranks among the greatest poets in the history of Romanian literature. When Angels Sing: Poetry and Prose of Magda Isanos presents, for the first time, English language versions of her writings, revealing their beauty, sensitivity, and aura of mysticism, along with a premonition of impending doom. One of the most remarkable female voices of her generation, the poetry and prose of Magda Isanos mirror the troubled era in which she lived, as well as the tragedy of her own life. The themes expounded in her literary works are universal, reflecting a wide spectrum of emotions. When Angels Sing is the first English language edition of poems and prose by this remarkable Romanian writer. It includes an introduction to the poet's life and work by A.K. Brackob, along with a postscript by the poet's late daughter, Elisabeta Isanos. A series of original illustrations by Romanian artist, Alexandra Chiri?a give visual expression to the literary creations of Magda Isanos. When Angels Sing is a book that belongs in any representative collection of world literature.
Shards from the Polar Ice by
"It would be hard to imagine Russian poetry in the last half century without Lydia Grigorieva," writeseminent Russian poet and critic Konstantin Kedrov. Grigorieva is a uniquely individual voice, bucking the trends of modernist poetry to create her own distinctive and beguiling body of poetry. Her work draws on her own remarkable life to create startlingly arresting images and metaphors, full of beauty and power, from her series that emerged from her Arctic childhood, to the troubles that beset Ukraine. Her range of influences is wide, and Beethoven, Freud, Sylvia Plath and Byron all appear in her poems as well as more familiar Russian images. At the heart of Grigorieva's poetry is what she calls its 'musicality' - her firm belief in the power of rhyme and rhythm in creating a poetic experience. In this first major collection of her work in English, English poet John Farndon, working with Grigorieva and co-translator Olga Nakston, has recreated this musicality in English so that English readers might experience for the first time what makes her work so revered in her Russian homeland.
Marina Tsvetaeva by
Marina Tsvetaeva: The Essential Poetry includes translations by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski of lyric poetry from all of great Modernist Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva's published collections and from all periods of her life. It also includes a translation of two of Tsvetaeva's masterpieces in the genre of the long poem, "Poem of the End" and "Poem of the Mountain." The collection strives to present the best of Tsvetaeva's poetry in a small single volume and to give a representative overview of Tsvetaeva's high art and development of different poetic styles over the course of her creative lifetime. Also included in the volume are a guest introduction by eminent American poet Tess Gallagher, a translator's introduction and extensive endnotes. Naydan and Yastremski have previously published a well-received annotated translation of Tsvetaeva's collection After Russia with Ardis Publishers. The fourteen previously published translations from the After Russia collection have been revised for this volume. *** A tragic figure in Russian literature, Marina Tsvetaeva is mentioned in the same heights of her distinguished contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. She published her first collection of intimate lyric poetry at her own expense in 1910 under the title Evening Album, which garnered positive reactions from several prominent poets, who by happenstance reviewed it. She published her second collection Magic Lantern in 1912 and a compilation from her first two collections From Two Books in 1913. Both publications marked her early years in poetry. To follow was her mature period that was shadowed by a romantic fiasco and childbirth in Tsvetaeva's life, and social turbulence in the old Russia that impacted her family. Despite severe hardship, Tsvetaeva's creative output was on the rise during the years of the Russian Civil War from 1917-1922. Her daughter Irina died of malnutrition at age 3 in 1920, a tragedy that sparked a series of poems that came out in the following years. Typical of Tsvetaeva in that period was creating lyrical diaries that closely followed events in her life in chronological order. Having immigrated to Europe, Tsvetaeva continued writing poetry but gradually shifted to mostly writing imaginative literary essays and prose memoirs. Another major creative outlet for her comprised the extensive correspondence she had with major poets such as Boris Pasternak and Rainer Marie Rilke. While in Paris, Tsvetaeva's husband Sergei Efron became involved with a Eurasian organization that promoted the return of Russian emigrants back to the USSR. Efron, after he was implicated in a plot to kill the defector Soviet agent Ignace Reiss, fled first to Spain then back to the USSR. Tsvetaeva followed her husband back to the Soviet Union with her family, where Efron was executed as a spy and her daughter Ariadna sentenced to a lengthy prison term in Stalin's GULAG on the same charge. After being evacuated to Yelabuga from Moscow with her son Mur, Tsvetaeva hanged herself on August 31, 1941. Following her death, her son joined the Red Army and was killed in battle in 1944.
The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry by
Selected for the pleasure and interest they offer these 400 or so poems from more than 150 poets span the entire century. While the major figures - MacDiarmid pre-eminently, and others such as Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, and George Mackay Brown - are generously represented, there are many other voices, from the master balladeer of the Yukon, Robert Service, to the internationally-known psychiatrist R D Laing, the distinguished economist Sir Alec Cairncross, and the troubled but deeply eloquent Rayne Mackinnon. Women are given due prominence. Readers unfamiliar with Helen Adam will experience a frisson at the sexual tensions of her ballad-poems while Naomi Mitchison reveals her intimate self. The admirable Marion Angus, Violet Jacob, and Helen B Cruickshank show their talents, while contemporary poets Liz Lochhead, Carol Ann Duffy, Janet Paisley, Jackie Kay, and many others, are well represented.In a century of unprecedented change, the poems also act as a commentary on their times - and Scotland's war poets such as Charles Hamilton Sorley and Hamish Henderson, with their anger and eloquence, are included. With its lively engagement with the real world as well as the world of private creativity, this anthology will contribute to an ongoing sense of Scottish cultural identity.Key Features* Includes more than 400 poems (compared to the 300 in the Faber volume)* Represents more than 150 poets (compared to the 70 or so in the Faber volume)* EUP's anthology spans the entire C20th century (while the Faber volume was published in the early 1990s)* The EUP volume includes more women poets than the Faber volume * The EUP volume is alphabetically arranged for ease of use (compared to the chronological arrangement of the Faber volume)* The EUP anthology includes biographjcal notes on each of the poets (which the Faber volume does not have)
The Glenbuchat Ballads by
Sometime in the early nineteenth century, most likely in the year 1818, the Reverend Robert Scott, minister of the parish of Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, compiled a collection of traditional ballads that until now has not been published. Most of the ballad collections produced during the Scottish Romantic Revival were eventually anthologized in Francis James Child's seminal English and Scottish Popular Ballads (five volumes, 1882-96). Yet, the Glenbuchat manuscripts, containing sixty-eight ballads in four folio volumes, were not included in Child's volumes. The complete work only came to light in 1949 when it was donated to the Special Collections of the Aberdeen University Library by a descendent of the original compiler. Scott did not give the precise locations of where he collected his ballads or name the performers, but the texts are unique and appear to have been drawn from oral sources. As such, the ballads reveal a great deal about the nature of traditional music at the time they were collected. The Glenbuchat Ballads were originally prepared for publication by David Buchan, one of the leading ballad scholars of the twentieth century. Upon Buchan's death, his former student James Moreira took up and completed his work and wrote the detailed introductory essay and annotations in this volume.
Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age by
A representative selection of the best poetry of Spain's Golden Age.
Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora by
Making Luis de Góngora's work available to contemporary English-language readers without denying his historical context, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora presents him as not only one of the greatest and most complex poets of his time, but also the funniest and most charismatic. From longer works, such as "The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea," to shorter ballads, songs, and sonnets, John Dent-Young's free translations capture Góngora's intensely musical voice and transmit the individuality and self-assuredness of the poet. Substantial introductions and extensive notes provide personal and historical context, explain the ubiquitous puns and erotic innuendo, and discuss translation choices. A significant edition of this seminal and challenging poet, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora will find an eager audience among students of poetry and scholars studying the history and literature of Spain.
Letters of Blood and Other Works in English by
This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson. It was Printz-Pahlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions. As well as "Letters of Blood," the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe," a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Pahlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Pahlson's poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means.
Words for War by
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.
Pavlo Tychyna by
Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) is arguably the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century and has been described as a "tillerman's Orpheus" by Ukrainian poet and literary critic Vasyl Barka. With his innovative poetics, deep spirituality and creative word play, Tychyna deserves a place among the pantheon of his European contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Osip Mandelstam. His early collections Clarinets of the Sun (1918), The Plow (1920), Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (1920), The Wind from Ukraine (1924), and his poetic cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (1921) mark the pinnacle of his creativity and poetically document the emotional and spiritual toll of the Revolution of 1917 as well as the Civil War and its aftermath in Ukraine. Tychyna coined the term "Clarinetism" to describe his earliest works, which intrinsically exhibit the clarity and the haunting sound of a clarinet. He harkens back to ancient Greek literature to form what has been called the "tragic lyric" in his short collection Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, which gives a personal, humanistic understanding to the tragic events of the Revolution. John Fizer has noted Tychyna's close affinity with Walt Whitman's cosmism, particularly in his cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos. While Tychyna in may ways displays the moral conscience of his times in his early works, later in his life he acquiesced to Soviet authorities in order to survive the horrors of Stalin's regime. He was forced by authorities to refuse a nomination for the Nobel Prize, the only reason for which would have been his Ukrainian ethnicity. This edition of Tychyna's complete early works includes translations of all his major early collections as well as his poetic masterpieces "Mother was Pealing Potatoes," "Funeral of My Friend," and his highly patriotic "In Memory of the Thirty." The volume includes a guest introduction by eminent Ukrainian poet Viktor Neborak. Translated by Michael M. Naydan.
The Garden of Divine Songs and Collected Poetry of Hryhory Skovoroda by
Hryhory Skovoroda is considered by many as the first great Slavic philosopher and poet. Written over a period stretching from the 1750s until 1785, his The Garden of Divine Songs is a unique collection of 30 poems, featuring a complex system of strophic structures and with only a few of the songs written in a traditional way. Skovoroda never repeats one and the same strophic structure; this being the case, his Garden of Divine Songs according to writer-scholar Valery Shevchuk functions as a "practical guide to the art of poetry," exemplifying all the meters and strophic patterns that were possible in Ukrainian poetry of that time. The poet makes masterful use of the accomplishments of academic poetry; the so-called "songs of the world" are the most prominent poems in this collection. These songs are an expression of Skovoroda's views in poetic form, and many ideas from The Garden of Divine Songs, such as the search for happiness in the world in song 21, would later form the basis for some of Skovoroda's philosophical treatises. Skovoroda's originality, and his ability to approach the most cardinal problems of human existence, stem from his capacity to combine known motifs, borrowed from literary sources such as classical texts, the Bible, and ancient Ukrainian poetic works, with his own system of thinking that focuses on his philosophy of the heart. The complete poems of Skovoroda are appearing in their entirety here in English for the first time, accompanied by a guest introduction by prominent Ukrainian writer Valery Shevchuk. This title has been realised by a team of the following dedicated professionals: Translated by Michael M. Naydan with an introduction by Valery Shevchuk Translations Edited by Olha Tytarenko Maxim Hodak - Максим Ходак (Publisher), Max Mendor - Макс Мендор (Director), Ksenia Papazova (Managing Editor).
English-Language Poetry from Wales, 1789-1806 by
This anthology presents a selection of poetry from Wales written in English in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. Arranged chronologically, it brings together a wide selection of little-known texts, some of which are published here for the first time. A comprehensive introduction sets the poems in their cultural and historical contexts, while detailed endnotes give concise biographies of the writers--where known--and explain specific references within the texts.