Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies. 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. "Giannisi's poetry is a wonderful combination of the classical and the underground avant-garde. Trained both in architecture and Ancient Greek, her poems tackle the problem of how to inhabit the spaces we live in—from the abandoned lot and the swimming pool to the page of the book. What a pleasure to have the full Homerica series in Brian Sneeden's lyrical translation."—Karen Van Dyck "Sneeden is a meticulous translator and a poet in his own right. He brings Phoebe Giannisi's work to life with immediacy and conviction."—Edmund Keeley

Homerica

Literature & Fiction

Giannisi, Phoebe

Poetry

World Poetry Books

Poetry. Women's Studies. Greek Studies. 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.

Rose Fear

Laina, Maria

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

Where the Paths Do Not Go

RILKE, RAINER MARIA

Poetry. Edited and Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley. A new translation of poetic masterpieces spanning Greece's Archaic and Golden Age to Byzantium. In these beautiful renderings Edmund Keeley displays his sensitivity as a translator and his imagination as a poet. The verses spring to life for a new generation of readers who will delight in the inventiveness, wit, and honesty of essential ancient Greek voices such as Plato, Leonidas, Callimachus, Meleager, Honestus, Strato, and Palladas. One of the foremost translators of the 20th century, Edmund Keeley has received international acclaim for his translations of the Greek poets C.P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, and Odysseas Elytis. "The Ancients did not mince words when it came to love and death. Edmund Keeley's stunning translation brings Ancient Greek pith and urgency into the 21st Century: playful and oracular, NAKEDNESS IS MY END is an essential study of human life in lyric form."--Karen Emmerich "In Keeley's lucid translations, we find just what we need: grace, humor, beauty, good advice, and succor; all that poetry has been bringing us through the darkness for these thousands of years. This expertly selected collection will remind you to 'treat yourself entirely to what good things there are.'"--Eleni Sikelianos

Nakedness Is My End: Poems from the Greek Anthology

Poetry. Asian &amp; 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 inspired translations of Ye Lijun which capture, with unerring musicality, the rhythms of the original Chinese."--Martha Kapos "Ye Lijun's quiet, powerful poems accrete from places, memories, affect, and ideas unique to the poet. The distinctiveness of Ye's diction, metaphors, and associations make her imagination and intelligence anchor in ours. We come away from Ye's mountain, her house, her books, her loves, and return to those of our own with our senses made more acute. Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, a gifted poet herself, creates an English-language voice for Ye Lijun that has all the grace and surprise of the original."--Thomas Moran "[T]he joys revealed in MY MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, which bring together a selection of poems from her three books, elegantly translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, suggest that for an acute observer of the natural world every hour, secret or not, may become an occasion for opening, 'in clarity,' to the beloved, to nature, to the invisible--leaves and roses and flowering trees that at a moment's notice may awaken in her soul, alerting her once again to the mysterious bounty of life on earth."--Christopher Merrill

My Mountain Country

Lijun, Ye

Poetry. Italian Studies. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. An essential new translation of one of Italian literature's most celebrated poets. Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals. "This collection is a revelation. In Geoffrey Brock's impeccable versions, Pascoli becomes a poet who demands to be read out loud. Time and again I found myself stopping to savor a phrase, a line break, a rhyme, a stanza. And then reading the poem over from the start. 'The Sleep of Odysseus' is heart-stopping. It's difficult to overstate my admiration for that tact, grace, and formal imagination that shape these remarkable translations."--Clare Cavanagh "A champion of childlike intuition, muted tones, and 'small things,' Pascoli has until now been confined to his corner of the map. In this personal anthology, poet and translator Geoff Brock conveys to us the best of Pascoli. His Pascoli is the author of subtle, bewitching poems that look both inward and outward, celebrating the natural world and the inner life of humble objects: kites, walking sticks, the little nests of spring. Brock has kept the rhymes and meters, and his deeply intelligent remakings breathe new life into the old idiom."--Will Schutt

Last Dream

Pascoli, Giovanni

Night

Moltedo, Ennio

Poetry. 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."

A Few Microseconds on Earth

Langda, Perrin

Humor & Satire

For the first time in English--an expansive collection of the poetry of Jean-Paul Auxeméry. 
For the first time in English--an expansive collection of the poetry of Jean-Paul Auxeméry, representing over three decades of work inspired by muses ancient and modern. Tarn's careful translations capture Auxeméry's virtuosic style, paying homage to a poet whose own translation repertoire includes Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. 
"This keen-sighted "wanderer of Europe in confusion" taps ancient cultures around the world to trace the warp and woof in the "fabric of reality." Yet Auxeméry also turns to his immediate American forebears to understand "our human thirst" and the "how and why of trans-/substantiations," tapping Olson's poetic propulsion, Creeley's sinuous syllabic dance, and Pound's reinvention of history "as one might cook a dish." Nathaniel Tarn's energetic translation, sensitive to shadings and nuance of sound and sense, captures both the echoes of Auxeméry's masters and the poet's own distinctive voice."--Tess Lewis 
"What an encounter! Tarn, a poet brought up in his mother's French and who subsequently, as a poet/anthropologist, migrated through numerous cultures and literary milieux to earn his place as one of the last living elders of American modernist poetry, here meets Auxeméry, a younger French-born poet whose global travels and mastery of divers languages have also taken him far from his native tongue in order, like Hölderlin or Olson, to rediscover a transfigured sense of the local. Both Tarn and Auxeméry, having undergone what Antoine Berman calls L'Épreuve de étranger--that is the trial of the foreign--here greet each other from amid their mutual histories of translation, learning to speak a common tongue."--Richard Sieburth 
"This generous Selected Poems displays the disparities with such postwar poets from the preceding generation, given the formal expansiveness, multi-layeredness, exoticness, and narrative impetus in Auxeméry's oeuvre."--John Taylor, The Fortnightly Review 
Poetry.

Selected Poems

Auxeméry, Jean-Paul

In HERS, Maria Laina, one of Greece's most important living poets, taking inspiration from Sappho's women-centered past and Cavafy's homoerotic future, presents an ascetic yet autoerotic treatise on of love at odds with societal norms. "In these still lifes of the interior, Maria is between worlds. Somewhere between the self and the mirror, the real and the invented, the dead and the living, etched in the color of charcoal. Who is sketching this life and who is watching it being sketched, and who is watching it being lived? These poems report back on what goes on in the spaces between. Sometimes the drawing goes outside the lines. Sometimes the beauty and simplicity of the movements is overwhelming in the most voluptuous way. A swarm of voices passes over you. You know everything and nothing. You 'gently chase the memory from [your] mouth.' Read these poems."--Eleni Sikelianos "One of the important voices of the 'Generation of the 70s,' a generation of Greek poets born into a war-ravaged Greece, and who came of literary age under the Junta (and a generation remarkable for prominent women poets) Maria Laina and her poetry remain under-appreciated and underrepresented in English. HERS is a book at once abstract and grounded, elusively cerebral and erotically charged, like flashes of images in splinters of a broken mirror, a minimalism that reflects and refracts. The surface simplicity of these poems arguably make them all the more difficult to render into English, but Karen Van Dyck has deftly brought them into a transparent idiom that lets their mystery shine through."--A. E. Stallings Poetry. Translation. Women's Studies.

Hers

History & Criticism

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