One of Poland’s best-known poets, Ewa Lipska is today a major figure in European literature. In their translation of Sefer, Lipska’s first novel, translators Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard deftly capture the poet’s unmistakable voice—cool and precise, gently ironic, and deeply humane.
Prompted by renowned poet E.D. Blodgett’s deep love for and intimate experience of Prague, Praha is a poetic homage to the legendary city’s vital spirit. As they build on one another, the poems in the collection lift the reader over the threshold of purely mythic understanding and into the heart of one of Europe’s loveliest and most venerable cities. Each poem is accompanied by a translat…
It is chiefly through the translations of Rossetti and Pound that English-speaking readers have encountered Cavalcanti’s work. Pound’s famous translation, now viewed by some as antiquated, is remarkably different from the translation provided here in the graceful voice of poet David Slavitt. Working under the significant restraints of Cavalcanti’s elaborate formal structures, Slavitt rend…
Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by …
The twelve “lays” of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France’s series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choice…
These stories evoke the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. The contradictions of this region’s history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature.