You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything—including their native languages—to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam. Gansel’s debut conveys the estrangement every translator experiences by moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.
None
Translated from the Greek by Sarah McCann. Maria Laina's debut English collection. Laina's poems carve symbolically rich images drawn from mythology and the natural world. Rose Fear follows in the Sapphic vein: fragmented, prophetic, and emotionally charged. Sarah McCann in her translations deftly captures the music and the vividness of Laina's scenes, which take their inspiration from regions as diverse as Japan, the Caribbean, and her native Greece. Yet always behind the recognizable world lie the rhythms and lights of the fairytale, the fable, and the spell. "A moving, vivid collection of verse ... The collection's strength lies in its ability to challenge the reader, and its study of time offers new ways of imagining the intangible."--Kirkus Reviews "Like a grim fairytale, Laina's silvery lullaby lyricism morphs into beautifully dark chants and hanging, haikulike scenes as it moves between voices and scraps of stories, complicating and recoloring the feeling of fear itself."--World Literature Today Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies
Translated by Rika Lesser. Written after the tragic and unexpected loss of her young husband, this spare and startling collection by celebrated Swedish poet and novelist Elisabeth Rynell offers a raw elegy in which everything lived--a visit with a therapist, a memory of lovemaking, a venture into the wilderness--becomes an expression of grief. Unflinching in their refusal of irony, these poems are elegantly rendered in Rika Lesser's translation, which is the first appearance of Rynell's verse in English. "Rika Lesser's fine translation recreates the demanding original with sympathetic resonance and perfect pitch." --Richard Howard "Elisabeth Rynell's Night Talks--which can be read as either ...
Translated from the Greek by Brian Sneeden. For the first time in English--a volume of poems by one of Greece's foremost poetic voices. Phoebe Giannisi's Homerica offers a contemporary Odyssey of loss, longing, motherhood, and metamorphosis, re-weaving classical mythology with modern experience. Yet the mythic characters and scenes never feel otherworldly--rather, they appear alongside the tugboat, the bicycle, the television, and the helicopter. Brian Sneeden's masterful translation captures the Delphic rhythms of Giannisi's oracular poems, which rarely travel in a straight line but rather glide across multiple threads of time, like a look interweaving strands of the mythological past. "Gia...
Translated by Pauline Levy Valensi. In this English debut, French poet Perrin Langda offers poems with equal parts surrealism and satire. Sex, global warming, video games, gentrification, and all the symptoms of late-stage capitalism are illuminated in Langda's microcosmic poems, composed in ecstatic flashes. Pauline Levy Valensi's skillful translation captures the irony and rhythm of these inventive lyrics, wherein "man emerges from mud / like a zombie and grills / the blood of the planet / which goes up in smoke." "An unusual, off-the-wall, merry, lively, eruptive, troubled but clear-sighted poetry, continuously in motion, geomorphic."--François-Xavier Farine "Langda's poems zoom in and out on temporal, digital, and emotional scales, flashing through exponentially infinite and infinitesimal temporalities. Yet Perrin's universe is in decay, his earth as blue as the rotting lemon in Joseph Beuys' 'Capri Batterie.' Pauline Levy Valensi voices these intricate miniatures in the elemental rhythms of punk rock."--Esther Allen Poetry.
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Poetry. Jewish Studies. What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while ...
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. In this remarkable English debut, award-winning Chinese contemporary poet Ye Lijun offers readers a lyrical diorama of nature and the inner world. By turns intimate and profound, Ye's poems in Fiona Sze-Lorrain's masterful translations make music of everyday silences, and illuminate the invisible openings in our lives. In this vital collection by one of China's essential literary voices, each encounter is an invitation, wherein a village, a nest, a telescope, or a book proves to be a transient guide to the unknown. "Fiona Sze-Lorrain brings her sense of immediacy, and her lucid control of tone, to these...
Poetry. Translated from the German by Burton Pike. One of the most influential poets of the 20th century, Rainer Maria Rilke has left an indelible mark on world literature. In this groundbreaking bilingual edition, award-winning translator Burton Pike captures the music, power, and unerring precision of some of Rilke's best-known poems. These renderings offer bold new insights that redefine our understanding of one of modern literature's most celebrated voices. "With these beautifully inventive and sensitive versions of some of Rilke's most complex and important poems, Burton Pike has given us a very special gift."--Breon Mitchell "Burton Pike captures the sonorousness, lyricism, and expressive intensity of Rilke's verse with astonishing facility, while preserving the succession of ideas and images and rendering the rhythm, tone, and diction with mastery and ingenuity."--Ross Benjamin