Poetry Translations: Authors Pérez to Yang
Omar Pérez López Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?
Translated from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 146pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611320 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Born in 1964 in Havana, Cuba, Omar Pérez is a member of the first generation to live fully under the auspices of the island's post-1959 government: children raised to envision the present and future in socially experimental terms. His second poetry collection, Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?, or Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, offered a mature, yet unusual, response to that ongoing challenge. The book was originally published by Letras Cubanas in 1998.
Fernando Pessoa Message
Translated from Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin. Bilingual edition.
Published 2007. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700271 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Pessoa published only one collection of his Portuguese poetry during his lifetime, and then only in 1934, a year before his death: Mensagem
(Message). This exquisite collection of apparently patriotic poems hides a deeply symbolic style, where famous figures from Portuguese history and national myth become symbols of the poet's life and quest. This volume is a second edition of the collection first published by Menard Press & King's College London in 1992.
Fernando Pessoa Selected English Poems
Published 2007. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 97819057002641 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Pessoa wrote a large number of poems in English, which prove to be fascinating precursors of the later, modernist work in Portuguese. While not the equal of the masterly Caeiro, Campos, Reis or Pessoa-himself, these poems deserve to be better known and at least available in the English-speaking world. Pessoa was educated in English in Durban, as the stepson of a Portuguese diplomat, and was completely bilingual. What is not so well-known is that Pessoa continued to write poetry in a bookish form of English throughout his life and this volume is an attempt to show the nature of that work to its originally intended audience — an anglophone readership.
Fernando Pessoa The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Translated from Portuguese by Chris Daniels. English only.
Published 2007. Paperback, 200pp, 8.5x5.5ins £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781905700240 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Translated by Chris Daniels, one of the USA's leading translators of Lusophone poetry. The only integral collection of the Caeiro heteronym in English, this is accompanied by the introductory writings of Ricardo Reis and a memoir by Álvaro de Campos, two of the other major poetic heteronyms, as well as a poem by C. Pacheco, believed to be another one-off heteronym of Pessoa's.
Fernando Pessoa The Collected Later Poems of Álvaro de Campos, 1928–1935
Translated from Portuguese by Chris Daniels. English only.
Published 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 196pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700257 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Álvaro de Campos, along with Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro is one of Pessoa's most important poetic heteronyms and, like these fellow fictitious poets, made his first appearance in 1914. He was also something of a public figure, his essays and reviews frequently appearing in Portuguese periodicals. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in the Algarve in 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, was widely travelled, and lived for a number of years in England, working as an engineer. In later life he returned to live in Lisbon. His poetry, especially the earlier work, celebrates the modern world and the machine age, and marks the eruption of futurism into Portuguese poetry.
Mariano Peyrou The Year of the Crab
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley. Bilingual volume.
Published 2019. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616387 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
The Year of the Crab
tells the story of an endless seaside summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent in the same place. It is a musical interplay of emotions and ideas, with recurring motifs and characters, often very funny, often profound, with a sense of childhood discovery remembered in maturity, an idyll with the background voices of fear, illness and death never far away, but also with strong intimations of love, nostalgia and happiness. It is a magical poem.
"The Year of the Crab
is transparent, of a transparency that is almost frightening: it speaks with the visionary ability of a child, but with the composure of an elderly man (…). It is a beautiful, marvellous tale of love and terror." (Ada Salas, Nayagua)
Mariano Peyrou Possibilities in Shade
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Published 2023. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. Bilingual edition.
Published 2023. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. Bilingual edition.
ISBN 9781848618596 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“‘Fear is the liquid state of / pain as a wound is the solid state of /fear.’
Mariano Peyrou’s pulsating and mesmerizing meditation on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which ‘two parallel lines meet / in your eyes.’ If parallel, how can these lines meet? The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because ‘Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.’ Peyrou’s Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an inspired ode to self-recognition.” —Marjorie Perloff
Mariano Peyrou’s pulsating and mesmerizing meditation on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which ‘two parallel lines meet / in your eyes.’ If parallel, how can these lines meet? The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because ‘Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.’ Peyrou’s Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an inspired ode to self-recognition.” —Marjorie Perloff
Alejandra Pizarnik Diana's Tree
Translated from Spanish by Anna Deeny. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95. Not for sale in North America.
ISBN 9781848617001 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Diana's Tree
is an important book — written in Paris, where she lived for four years — and the first really mature work (1963) by Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), increasingly recognised as one of the major poetic voices of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America.
Boris Poplavsky Flags
Translated from Russian by Belinda Cooke & Richard McKane. English only.
Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610606 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Flags
was the only volume of poetry published by the Russian emigré poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935) during his own lifetime. A significant Surrealist volume, it is one of the "lost" creations of a man who has been called the greatest of the Russian emigré poets. Now recovered by Russian literary experts and re-edited for a new public, Poplavsky is gaining the readership that eluded him in his lifetime. Unusually, this book presents the complete contents of the original volume (Paris, 1933), rather than presenting a Selected or some other overview, and thus opens a window onto a fascinating and unfairly neglected figure.
Ilma Rakusa A Farewell to Everything
Translated from German by Andrew Shields & Andrew Winnard. English only.
Published 2005. Paperback, 100pp, 8 x 5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9780907562771
A Farewell to Everything
is a translation of the author's 1997 German collection Ein Strich durch alles
(Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main): ninety nine-line poems written over a one-year period. The book is made available thanks to a translation grant from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Culture Foundation. Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, to a Hungarian mother and a Slovenian father, and spent her childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. She lives in Zürich.
Tessa Ransford (ed./trans.) The Nightingale Question: 5 Poets from Saxony
Translated from German.
Published 2004. Paperback, 8.5x5.5ins. 108pp. £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9780907562528
In the 2002, poet Tessa Ransford and artist Joyce Gunn-Cairns travelled to Leipzig as part of a Scottish Arts Council travel award. While there, Tessa investigated the local poetry scene and translated 5 poets based in Saxony: one in Weimar, one near Dresden and three from Leipzig itself. Joyce sketched portarits of each of the writers and made the portrait photographs that grace the cover of the book. The poets included are Wulf Kirsten, Uta Mauersberger, Andreas Reimann, Thomas Rosenlöcher, Elmar Schenkel and Tessa Ransford herself.
Alfonso Reyes Miracle of Mexico
Translated from Spanish by Timothy Adès. Bilingual edition.
Published 2019. Paperback, 214pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848616882 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was the leading Mexican writer of his time. He was revered by his great successor Octavio Paz, a writer who, like himself, was also an Ambassador. Enormously prolific, he was a master of the essay, that “most Latin-American of art forms” and an outstanding critic. He knew Hispanic and classical literature, and translated Homer, Sterne, Chesterton, Stevenson, Shaw, and Chekhov. In turn, Samuel Beckett translated some of his poems into English; some of his essays, too, can be read in English.
Reyes saw writing as “the richest means of expressing human feeling”. “Double redemption by the word: first through the concord of bloods; second through the shaping of the personality, in its relation to others as well as in its inner growth.” His poetry was varied, always skilful and urbane, and was far outweighed by his huge output of prose. The present selection aims to convey his amazing, half-forgotten skill and some of the flavour and astonishing variety of his formal verse.
Rainer Maria Rilke From Notebooks and Personal Papers
Translated from German by David Need. Bilingual edition.
Published 2018. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $22. ISBN 9781848616028
[Download a sample PDF from this book here
(English texts only).]
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is recognized as one of the great poets of 20th century European modernism. From 1921-1926, he lived in southern Switzerland, in a region called the Valais. Following the completion of the Duino Elegies
and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke began to work in both French and German. A collection of French poems addressed to the landscape of Valais, Quatrains Valaisans, was published in 1926. In May of that same year, Rilke sent his publishers an arrangement of German language poems as a possible manuscript; the bulk of these date to 1924, but the collection included both material culled from a recently recovered 1906 daybook and a final set of poems written over the last two years of his life. Rilke sent the last of these in August 1926; he would die of complications from leukaemia just four months later.
This volume is the first English translation of these poems in the arrangement Rilke had set down in 1926. The arrangement translated here has only appeared in German as Aus Taschen-Büchern und Merk-Blättern (Insel-Verlag, 1950).
Manuel Rivas The Disappearance of Snow
Translated from Galician by Lorna Shaughnessy. Bilingual edition.
Published 2012. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848612211 [Download a sample PDF from this book here
(English texts only).]
Many readers outside Spain do not know that the acclaimed novelist, Manuel Rivas, is a significant poet in his homeland, writing in his native Galician. This volume redresses the balance, offering a bilingual edition of his 2009 collection A desapareción da neve, which, in an unusual move, was published in all 4 national languages under one set of covers — Galician, Castilian, Catalan and Basque.
Manuel Rivas The Mouth of the Earth
Translated from Galician by Lorna Shaughnessy. English only.
Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616233 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
For Manuel Rivas, words are the most sensitive of creatures. In the same way that frogs or glow-worms are the first to manifest signs of pollution in the natural environment, words suffer as a result of corruption in the socio-political sphere. In his work as journalist, writer of fiction, poetry or essays, he is consistent in his role as custodian of all sensitive creatures; his writings document historical damage and alert us to potential future harm to our natural, linguistic and political eco-systems. With the same level of attention that a naturalist dedicates to minute indicators of change – the briefest of absences, the apparently insignificant break of behavioural patterns in a micro-environment – Rivas observes the signs and listens to the sounds that emerge from the mouth of earth. Like all his literary publications, this collection of poems was written in Galician, and first published in 2015 by the Galician language publishing house, Xerais, as A boca da terra.
It represents another contribution by Rivas to the linguistic ‘biodiversity’ of Spain that he believes should be protected by policy-makers as a precious resource, rather than regarded as a problem.
Claudio Rodríguez Collected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith. Bilingual edition.
Published 2008. Paperback, 416pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $29
ISBN 9781848610095 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodríguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (who was responsible for the Shearsman editions of Rosalía de Castro, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and César Vallejo) and Luís Ingelmo (who worked on the Bécquer edition with Michael Smith and wrote the introduction and notes for that volume, this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, but major literary figure. Perhaps the most important of the '50s generation in Spain, Rodríguez's work deserves to be better-known in the anglophone world.
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez rebel matter : poems 2000–2021
Published 2022. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618527 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This magnificent selection from two decades of work by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez confirms his pivotal position in international poetry. Dissolving fixed identities and formal limitations alike, the mercurial spaces of these poems reveal multiple selves, elliptical journeys and a passionate attention to everyday sensory experience. This is Cuban poetry energized by transcultural encounters, while two vital language currents of the Americas, Spanish and English, meet in Katherine Hedeen’s scintillating translations. As ‘rebel matter’, these are poems that engage with the world in its elements – molten, fluid and restless. They invite the reader to tune in to new frequencies, not just to the sonic pleasures of language, but also to the lively matter of a universe beyond the human, its squirrels, asphalt, dust clouds and stars. Poetry’s imaginative potential, Rodríguez Núñez reminds us, generates forms of dialogue that are more urgent now than ever: ‘there won’t be revolution / if we don’t let night speak’." —Zoë Skoulding
Mercedes Roffé Like the Rains Come — Selected Poems 1987-2006
Translated from Spanish by Janet Greenberg, with the author. English only.
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700554 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Like the Rains Come. Selected Poems
(1987–2006) is Mercedes Roffé's first book-length collection published in English. Including poems from one of her earliest books, The Lower Chamber
(1983), which placed her among the most innovative Latin American poets of the 80s, as well as the series 'Mayan Definitions' — her internationally-acclaimed poems from La ópera fantasma
(2006) — Like the Rains Come
introduces a broad spectrum of Roffé's compelling and protean poetics to the English-language reader.
Mercedes Roffé Floating Lanterns
Translated from Spanish by Anna Deeny. English only.
Published 2015. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN9781848613720 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Floating Lanterns, her eighth poetry collection, Mercedes Roffé draws from a range of creation myths, sacred texts, philosophy and poetry that meditates upon human nature and our propensity for evil. She brings together Buddhism, Tibetan Yoga, the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Kabbalah, Plato's Republic, T. S. Eliot, Beat poets, the oral traditions of Medieval Spain and North American indigenous cosmogonies.What binds these diverse materials is Roffé's use of anaphora.
Daniel Samoilovich The Enchanted Isles
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Published April 2023. Paperback, 214pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23. Bilingual edition.
ISBN 9781848618107 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Enchanted Isles
begins with a dream in which Oh, the narrator, returns to a voyage he made to the Galápagos (known as enchanted because of their dangerous currents that lured seamen to their deaths) ten years earlier. It was to be a voyage of enchantment, a lovers’ voyage, an eight-day cruise paid for by a magical win at roulette, the number eight coming up eight times in a row.
But Ah and Oh have separated in the meantime and so the memory dream is shot through with regret and also with a sometimes nightmarish vision of the ugly black volcanic islands where Darwin, observing mutations in finches, first came up with the idea of evolution.
In a multi-themed jazz rondo form, extracts from Darwin’s writings, geometry, chance and fate, giant tortoises complaining of human depredation, iguanas, jellyfish, blades of grass, extinct volcanoes, scuba diving and tender tourist conversation dance round and round. Occasionally the music breaks down and stutters, we are hearing dissonance as well as secret harmonies. This is a work of great lyricism, teasing humour and complex originality, a poem of everything.
Mario Sampaolesi Two Poems
Translated from Spanish by Ian Taylor. English only.
Published 2013. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612679 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The tensions present within the works of Mario Sampaolesi stem from the conflicted relationship with reality that powers poetry itself, an electrical charge created by a constant flitting between engagement, detachment and total abstraction. The 'real' is represented by a mountain or an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean; it appears in the snow and animals that are present within the mountain landscape, the geology and sea life of the Malvinas present and the war of Falklands past. But mostly it appears refracted through the distorting consciousnesses of the two men who wander through these terrains, two men so outside of the 'real' that their presence is never more than that of ghosts or destructive trespassers.
Andrés Sánchez Robayna The Book, Behind the Dune
Translated from Spanish by Louis Bourne. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 134pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / £20
ISBN 9781848615229 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
The Book, Behind the Dune
is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty, eroticism and the reality of evil. Influenced by St. Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing
and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the poem, full of literary, artistic and philosophical references, is simultaneously a meditation on the meaning of time and its manifestations—its epiphanies—in a concrete life. The reflection on historical time leads the poet to the reality of “the pain of the world,” but also towards a world that is incessantly and continually beginning. As Yves Bonnefoy puts it, “Sánchez Robayna knows what ‘the new time’ expects of us which Rimbaud foresaw as ‘very severe’.”
Lutz Seiler In the year one — Selected Poems
Translated from German by Tony Frazer.
Published in Australia, 2005, by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney; distributed in the UK by Shearsman Books.)
Paperback, 93pp, 6.7x5.9ins. £8.00 / $A20 in Australia.
ISBN 9781920882112
The first book-length colection of Lutz Seiler's work in English translation, In the year one contains poems drawn from his second and third German collections: pech & blende
(2000) and vierzig kilometer nacht
(2003).
Michael Smith Maldon, & Other Translations
Published 2004. Paperback, 9x6ins, 161pp. £9.95.
ISBN 9780907562597. OUT OF PRINT.
This volume has been partially superseded by Cantes flamencos
(2012, see below) and by the Maldon
chapbook (2019, see also below).
The book
contained translations from the Anglo-Saxon (The Battle of Maldon), the 18th-century Irish (The Death of Art O'Leary
and Sean O'Dwyer of the Glen) and a large selection of cantes flamencos
(flamenco songs) translated from an Andalusian dialect of Spanish. Although better-known in the UK for his translations of the baroque poets Góngora and Quevedo, Michael Smith has also translated the works of Rosalía de Castro, Neruda, Lorca and Miguel Hernández.
Michael Smith Poems from Other Tongues
Published 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611344. OUT OF PRINT.
A companion volume to Michael Smith's Maldon & Other Translations
(2004), this volume collects his translations from Greek, Latin, Irish and Andalusian Arabic.
Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo (eds & trans.) Cantes flamencos (Flamenco Songs): The Deep Songs of Spain
Published 2012. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20 Bilingual edition.
ISBN 9781848612105 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, these are the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances — these are the songs wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace. Not high art certainly, but a part of deeper fabric of the real Spain, and a powerful influence on poets such Lorca.
Michael Smith Maldon — A Version
Published 2019. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848616530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Maldon is a version of the Anglo-Saxon epic fragment usually known as The Battle of Maldon , which tells the tale of a battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the invading Vikings which took place ca. 991 AD on the shores of the River Blackwater, almost certainly opposite Northey Island.
"Smith’s version [of Maldon ] preserves nicely a ghost of the alliterative pattern that rumbles through the original, without trying to reproduce it fully in a clog-dance of consonants. It is recognisably the same poem as the original: it has its linguistic density and compelling narrative pull, but it is free from the mildewed quaintness that sometimes hangs around translation from Old English.”
—Dr. Alex Davis, U.C. Cork
Irene Solà Beast
Translated from Catalan by Oscar Holloway & the author. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615526 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Beast
is the first collection in English from award-winning Catalan poet Irene Solà, a darkly imaged, startling and lyrically precise exploration of gender, identity, sexuality and multiple forms of desire.
“Beast
enters incisively, like claws. It arrives with gleaming fur and stinking. It’s a creature that spills its guts and impels the same from others—peoples, animals, limbs, foodstuffs, logical thinking, familial and sexual relations. In Irene Solà’s scenes, there’s nothing that isn’t jammed together and insecure but what’s constant is temperament. Beast comes swiftly, with a brazen laugh and cocked ears. Watch out when the lines pause for weird and possibly lethal detours. As Solà jolts, pulses and pushes off, she might leave the paths littered with bouquets or corpses.” —Heather Phillipson
Geoffrey Squires (ed./trans.) My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200
Published 2015. Paperback, 240pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848614338 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems translated here were, with one or two possible exceptions, written between the 7th and 12th centuries AD, making them the oldest vernacular poetry in Europe. Latin, which arrived with Christianity in the 5th century and brought a script, was the only other language in play, although there are occasional loanwords from Norse and other tongues.
Scholars can roughly assign the poems to centuries, on the basis of changes in syntax and word forms, but many that were written earlier exist only in later manuscripts. Dating is thus hazardous, and nor do we usually know the author. It is likely that one was written by a druid, six by women and rather more by professional bards; the remainder are probably by clerics or scribes.
Hadassa Tal but first i call your name
Translated from Hebrew by Joanna Chen. English only.
Published 2021.
Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848617797 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Hadassa Tal’s poetry is a manuscript of pain and beauty. 'How beautiful is all this beauty,' she writes, 'How will I surrender you to the ground.' But the power of these poems is just that: they do not surrender beauty to the ground. They give it to the wind, to the water, to the dance, they elevate it 'higher than the dome of thought', they sift through 'the death from the death within.' These broken poems create the 'elusive miracle' that allows us to grasp what can not be grasped, to know what is impossible to know. Thus, throughout the pages of this book, they shift across states of matter and registers of language and voice, only to hold one tiny girl, 'innocent of words,' and to release her from the innumerable eyes that are reflected in the noting." —Dana Amir.
Volodia Teitelboim Vicente Huidobro — in perpetual motion. A Biography.
Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer
Published 2022. Paperback, 328pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25.
ISBN 9781848618084 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Volodia Teitelboim knew Huidobro when the poet returned to Chile from Paris after the Great Depression began. A tyro poet himself, and a committed leftist, the author was to fall out with Huidobro before the end of the decade, but not before co-editing the groundbreaking
Anthology of New Chilean Poetry in 1935, which foregrounded Huidobro's work. Poet, novelist and essayist, as well as, eventually, leader of Chile's Communist Party, Teitelboim is an excellent and often amusing guide to his mercurial subject, and offers a plethora of stories and anecdotes from those who knew Huidobro well, as well as recalled conversations with the great man himself. This book was the third of Teitelboim's poet biographies, following books devoted to Neruda and Mistral.
Marina Tsvetaeva Head on a Gleaming Plate — Poems 1917–1918
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published 2022. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848618435 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and November 1918, and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates only on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, and their importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioned and endangered humanity, including those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time, to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that ‘It befits heroes to be frozen’, she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, very personal heroism, at a stage when the very worst was still to come.
Marina Tsvetaeva Poem of the End: 6 Narrative Poems
Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman. Bilingual volume.
Published 2021.
Paperback, 164pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848617780 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This bilingual collection contains six of Tsvetaeva’s acclaimed narrative poems. She always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented ‘On a Red Steed’ to the lyrical-confessional ‘Poem of the Mountain’ and ‘Poem of the End’ to the more metaphysical later poems, ‘An Attempt at a Room’, a beautiful requiem for Rilke, ‘New Year’s Greetings’, and ‘Poem of the Air’, a stirring celebration of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul’s freedom.
Marina Tsvetaeva Youthful Verses
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte. English only.
Published 2020. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617315 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poems in Youthful Verses
cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Marina Tsvetaeva’s life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet. Despite a disturbing undercurrent of self-denigration, these poems are characterised throughout by deft humour, a pervasive sense of mischief, and a high degree of formal perfection.
Marina Tsvetaeva After Russia (The Second Notebook)
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte. English only.
Published 2018. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
As a collection, After Russia
began with what can be spoken of as a decided repudiation of everything Tsvetaeva had left behind her. As cultural referents, Russia, its literature and settings, give way to classical mythology and the Bible, to Shakespeare and Racine. As the Second Notebook
approaches its close, however, Russia seeps back into the current of her poetry. ‘Organs have fewer notes, no tambourine’ evokes Pushkin and Prince Igor. ‘Christenings’ evokes in detail the rituals associated with an Orthodox marriage ceremony, and ‘Having bargained for a stirrup’, which again has one of Tsvetaeva’s disorienting openings, like a close-up from which we dizzyingly pan out to a whole scenario whose import temporarily escapes us, expresses her concern for ‘our/ Russian good name’ while at the same time citing the golden hoard from Wagner’s Ring cycle and the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, for whom Tsvetaeva felt such a persistent affinity.
It is fitting that the collection closes with two items addressed to its presiding spirit, Pasternak. ‘Dis-tancing us’ plays with the infinite possible permutations of the Russian prefix рас- [ras] indicating separation, dispersal, or disintegration, for which English dis-
can function as a close equivalent. The two quatraiins which end the book offer an obeisance in turn to a Russian peasant woman and to Tsvetaeva’s poet-correspondent, ‘in a lilt of rains and woe/ like Homer in hexameters’, the returning grip of whose hand is an earnest, not just for the Russia Tsvetaeva has left behind, but for that other world which knows none of the injustices and incompleteness of the one in which we live.
Marina Tsvetaeva After Russia (The First Notebook)
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte. English only.
Published 2017. Paperback, 142pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615496 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
ISBN 9781848615496 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
After Russia
(1928) is considered to mark the high point in Marina Tsvetaeva’s output of shorter, lyrical poems. Tsvetaeva told Boris Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Breathtaking technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from the circle of human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life itself. The sequence ‘Trees’ evokes the hills and woods of Bohemia where Tsvetaeva loved to roam, while ‘Wires’ takes telegraph wires as the central image for the geographical distance separating her from Pasternak.
The volume presented here offers the first of the two notebooks; the second will follow in 2018.
Marina Tsvetaeva Milestones
Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte. English only.
Published 2015. Paperback, 120pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
Milestones
(Vyorsty) is an early collection by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), published in Moscow in 1922, before she left the country for the West. The book celebrates—among other things—her friendship with fellow-poet, Osip Mandelstam, and was her most innovative collection to that point, as well as an indication of the way her work would develop in her full maturity as a writer.
Tin Ujevic Twelve Poems
Translated from Croatian by Richard Berengarten and Dasa Maric. English only.
Published 2013. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848613164 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (Translations only).]
Tin Ujevic (1891-1955) is regarded in his native Croatia with the same kind of popular affection and respect as Robert Burns in Scotland. His poems appeal to people of all ages and conditions. Under their deceptively simple surfaces lie deep linguistic sonorities and emotional resonances. Born in Dalmatia, Tin lived in Belgrade, Mostar, Sarejevo, Split, Zagreb and Paris. A natural Bohemian, he was always poor. Tin's writings have hardly been translated into English. These versions not only render the meanings of the originals, but also respect their musicality and form. For the first time, they make one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century available in English.
Lars Amund Vaage The Red Place
Translated from Norwegian by Anna Reckin & Hanne Bramness. English only.
Published 2020. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617117 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Into the epic sweep of Lars Amund Vaage’s long poem The Red Place
come many presences in many dimensions: the living, the dead and – part-mythic, part-realist, part-surreal – the ghosts of earlier selves. Mother progresses through a series of ‘red places’ until she reaches somewhere ‘Her feet would go no further.’ Father ‘stands by me / outside of me / whistling notes / that don’t exist.’ We see the poet at the piano as a child and as an adult, and the joys and poignancy of music sound powerfully throughout. Moving tenderly between farmland and the city, great concert halls and a family going out in the evening on the tractor to find music, Vaage’s poetry is rich, simple, complex, and wise.
Lars Amund Vaage The Mute
Translated from Norwegian by Kenneth Steven. English only.
Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612600 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The mute — perhaps especially he — can be expressive too. That is one of the claims/assertions Lars Amund Vaage develops in these poems. Many of the poems concern work. Work can also be creation, language, initiation. But, in the great circle of life and death, work can also represent a loss of meaning. Love is a central theme, with its power to create.
Lars Amund Vaage Outside the Institution — Selected Poems
Translated from Norwegian by Hanne Bramness and Frances Presley. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610750 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first collection in English by Lars Amund Vaage, one of the most significant poets and novelists of his generation in Norway.
Judita Vaičiūnaitė Vagabond Sun — Selected Poems
Translated from Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris. English only.
Published 2018. Paperback, 100pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616202 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Judita Vaičiūnaitė (1937–2001) was one of Lithuania’s leading poets of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the first real city poets. Her work explores history, mythology, and city life from the perspective of a modern woman. She published over twenty books of poetry, as well as translations of poetry, poetry books for children, and plays. She worked as an editor for several leading literary journals in Lithuania. Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Russian, and other languages, and garnered numerous prizes, including the Lithuanian Writer’s Union Prize in 2000, and the national award of the Gediminas Cross in 1997.
César Vallejo The Complete Poems
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi. Bilingual edition.
Published 2012. Paperback, 773pp, 9x6ins, £27.95 / $39.95
ISBN 9781848612266 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This large volume brings together under one set of covers the three volumes published by Shearsman in 2005 and 2007: The Black Heralds and Other Early Poems, Trilce
and The Complete Later Poems. Some minor errors have been corrected and one additional poem—recently rediscovered—has been added to the Early Poems
section.
César Vallejo Trilce — centennial edition
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi
Published 2022. Paperback, 250pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25.
Published 2022. Paperback, 250pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25.
ISBN 9781848618404 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Trilce is one of the great monuments of 20th-Century Hispanic poetry, as important in Hispanic letters, as The Waste Land and The Cantos in the anglophone world, and all the more amazing for having been composed in remote Peru. Full of neologisms and symbols, the book is one that needs to be re-translated often, but this is only the second version to appear in the UK, and the fourth in the USA. A fully bilingual book, the Spanish texts are based upon the very latest scholarship, and are presented with full explanatory annotations for the English-speaking reader. Apart from the canonical text of Trilce, the book also includes an appendix of a further eleven poems, some of which are earlier variants and some which are poems connected to the main text, which it is useful to have available as background to the canonical version of Trilce.
Vallejo is regarded as the most important poet of Peru, one of the great figures of Latin American literature, and one of the titans of the pre-war international avant-garde. The translations are by the Irish poet, and award-winning translator, Michael Smith, and the Peruvian scholar Valentino Gianuzzi.
César Vallejo Trilce
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi. Bilingual edition.
1st edition, published 2005. Paperback, 256pp, 8.5x5.5ins. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9780907562726
Now replaced by the centennial edition listed above.
César Vallejo Complete Later Poems 1923-1938
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by Valentino Gianuzzi & Michael Smith. Bilingual edition.
Published 2005. Paperback, 420pp, 8.5x 5.5ins, £17.95 / $28.
ISBN 9780907562733 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume brings together all of the post-Trilce
work that has been identified by the latest scholarship and included in the most recent Peruvian edition of the author's works. The Spanish texts have benefitted from a number of corrections, as compared to previous publications. The poems are presented chronologically—as far as the chronology can be ascertained—and the book offers the most complete version yet of this magnificent body of work.
César Vallejo The Black Heralds & Other Early Poems
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi. Bilingual edition.
Published 2007. Paperback, 268pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $23.
ISBN 9781905700103 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume completes the Shearsman Vallejo project. Before writing his breakthrough poem-sequence Trilce, César
Vallejo published The Black Heralds, his first book of poems, in 1919. Although heavily indebted to the aesthetics of modernismo, Vallejo's early volume finds a way to escape the merely decorative, and includes poems of indubitable originality, harbingers of his later masterpieces. The most thorough volume of Vallejo's early work yet to be made available in English.
César Vallejo Selected Poems
Edited, and translated from Spanish, by Michael Smith & Valentino Gianuzzi. Bilingual edition.
Published 2006. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9780907562993
In 2005, Shearsman Books published the astonishing new translations of Vallejo's Trilce
and Complete Poems
1923–1938, edited and translated by Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith. This Selected
fills an important gap on the bookshelves by making available a rigorously-edited bilingual selection of Vallejo's work, which draws on the full range of Vallejo's work, including his first collection, The Black Heralds, itself a fascinating work which demonstrates where his astonishing art originated, and what boundaries he had to cross in order to achieve the heights marked by Trilce.
Dirk van Bastelaere The Last to Leave — Selected Poems
Translated from Flemish by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons and Francis R. Jones.
Published 2005. 119pp, paperback. £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9780907562702
Dirk van Bastelaere (1960) is one of the leading poets in Flanders. He came to prominence with his award-winning first collection Vijf jaar
(1984) and then published Pornschlegel en andere gedichten (1988), one of the most hotly debated collections of Flemish poetry in recent times. This volume was to win for him recognition as the most important postmodern poet in Flanders. In 2000, he published Hartswedervaren, widely regarded as his finest book to date, and for which he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize.
Orhan Veli The Complete Poems
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 208pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848614376 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Orhan Veli Kanık (1914–1950), more commonly known as Orhan Veli, was a pioneering Turkish poet and one of the founding members of the Garip
(Strange) movement. His innovative poetics wore a unique signature of austerity and accessibility. With arresting insight and playful irreverence, Veli’s poems transformed the Turkish literary world.
Now, at last, this edition of The Complete Poems
makes the full breadth of his achievement available in English for the first time. It brings together poems from the five collections published during the author’s lifetime, as well as uncollected material from newspapers and magazines, and poems only published posthumously.
Juan Antonio Villacañas Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith & Beatriz Villacañas. Bilingual edition.
Edited by Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610637 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Juan Antonio Villacañas (1922–2001) was one of the most significant poets in post-war Spain, and this volume—prepared with the help of the poet's daughter—is the first edition of his work to be made available in English.
Virgil / David Hadbawnik Aeneid — 1-volume edition
Published June 2023. Paperback, 420pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32.50
ISBN 9781848618992 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
We issued the first half of David Hadbawnik's remarkable modern version of the
Aeneid in 2015, and followed that with the second half in 2021. Both of those editions were fully illustrated. We now offer a more affordable package, with the entire text between one set of covers, but without the illustrations.
“…Hadbawnik’s ironic wit brings Virgil’s text to life for a contemporary readership even more impatient than its historic counterpart with the potential longueurs of traditional epic. [… his] version is fresh, irreverent, and radical.
[…] In sum, this is a startling and stimulating version of Virgil’s great epic for a twenty-first century readership which will engage student attention and has some interest for Translation Studies. Its lively irreverence reflects the way in which classical reception now (at last) feels able to tackle one of the central texts of Latin and European literature with up-to-date brio and gusto. Its in-your-face tactics will surely bring new readers and enthusiasts to the Aeneid, and has something to say to old ones too.” —Stephen Harrison,
Translation and Literature
Virgil (translated by David Hadbawnik) Aeneid, Books I-VI
Published 2015. Paperback, 218pp, 9.25 x 7.5ins, £14.95 / $23. English only. NOW WITHDRAWN
ISBN 9781848614284 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
With illustrations by Carrie Kaser.
David Hadbawnik’s astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid has been appearing in excerpts in a number of US publications, but this is the first time that a sizeable group of them has been bought together. This handsome volume presents Hadbawnik’s version of the first half of Virgil’s great national epic, with atmospheric illustrations from Carrie Kaser.
Virgil (translated by David Hadbawnik) Aeneid, Books I-VI
Published 2021. Hardcover, 214pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £22.95 / $35. English only.
ISBN 9781848617827 [Download a sample PDF from the paperback version here.]
With illustrations by Carrie Kaser.
This is the hardcover version of the above book originally published in paperback in 2015 and still available. See below for Books VII-XII.
This is the hardcover version of the above book originally published in paperback in 2015 and still available. See below for Books VII-XII.
David Hadbawnik’s astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid
has been appearing in excerpts in a number of US publications, but this is the first time that a sizeable group of them has been bought together. This handsome volume presents Hadbawnik’s version of the first half of Virgil’s great national epic, with atmospheric illustrations from Carrie Kaser.
Virgil (translated by David Hadbawnik) Aeneid, Books VII-XII
Published 2021. Hardcover, 368pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £35 / $52.50. English only.
ISBN 9781848617636 [Download a sample PDF from the paperback version here.]
With over 70
full-colour
illustrations by Omar Al-Nakib.
This is the hardcover version of a book also available in paperback with grayscale images. See below.
This is the hardcover version of a book also available in paperback with grayscale images. See below.
The first six books of David Hadbawnik’s astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid appeared from Shearsman Books in 2015. He now brings the whole project to a spectacular conclusion in a volume accompanied by Omar Al-Nakib’s dramatic abstract illustrations.
“Few narrative poems have possessed the Western imagination like Virgil’s twelve-book epic written during Augustus’s triumphant consolidation of the Roman Empire. […] This new volume goes a long way toward moving the narrative into the hands of contemporary readers, drawing out a playful understanding of the ancient story while exhibiting modern preferences for poetic interaction and inquiry into the history and terms of poetic form and translation. Hadbawnik shows the fun to be had in language’s etymological resonance, and he delights in scenes of dramatic fulfillment and failure. His translation distills the essence of the narrative by directing a reader’s perception of the tale." —from Dale Martin Smith's Introduction.
Virgil (translated by David Hadbawnik) Aeneid, Books VII-XII
Published 2021. Paperback, 368pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £17.95 / $29.95. English only.
ISBN 9781848617803 [Download a sample PDF here.]
With over 70
grayscale
illustrations by Omar Al-Nakib.
This is the paperback version of a book also available in hardcover and in full-colour. See above.
This is the paperback version of a book also available in hardcover and in full-colour. See above.
The first six books of David Hadbawnik’s astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid
appeared from Shearsman Books in 2015. He now brings the whole project to a spectacular conclusion in a volume accompanied by Omar Al-Nakib’s dramatic abstract illustrations.
“Few narrative poems have possessed the Western imagination like Virgil’s twelve-book epic written during Augustus’s triumphant consolidation of the Roman Empire. […] This new volume goes a long way toward moving the narrative into the hands of contemporary readers, drawing out a playful understanding of the ancient story while exhibiting modern preferences for poetic interaction and inquiry into the history and terms of poetic form and translation. Hadbawnik shows the fun to be had in language’s etymological resonance, and he delights in scenes of dramatic fulfillment and failure. His translation distills the essence of the narrative by directing a reader’s perception of the tale." —from Dale Martin Smith's Introduction.
Verónica Volkow Arcana and Other Poems
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo. English only.
Published 2009. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610569 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Verónica Volkow is one of Mexico's most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence Arcana , with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics to give an overview of this remarkable poet's oeuvre.
David Wevill Translations
Published 2022. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / US$18.
ISBN 9781848618336 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Not for sale in Canada.
Not for sale in Canada.
This collection brings together all of David Wevill's translations, other than those of Ferenc Juhász, which we are publishing in a separate volume. Poets covered in this book are Baudelaire and San Juan de la Cruz (one poem each), Pessoa, Alberto de Lacerda and — at some length — Pindar.
Menno Wigman The World by Evening
Translated from Dutch by Judith Wilkinson. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616615 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Menno Wigman (1966–2018) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Netherlands, with many awards to his name, and his early death sent shock-waves through the Dutch literary world. His work has been placed in the tradition of European Romanticism. At times echoing Baudelaire, and equally preoccupied with the darker sides of urban life, Wigman has been called the dandy of disillusion. But his poems are never indulgent and tend to move from doubt to recommitment, from ironic detachment to passionate engagement. His work is stormy, full of tension, scathing one moment and tender the next, with an uncompromising self-scrutiny implicit in the undertaking. He offers us poetry as ‘divine trauma’: a raw lyricism that refuses any easy coming to terms. Now that his work is increasingly appearing in translation, Wigman is beginning to be recognised as an important voice in European poetry.
Ron Winkler Fragmented Waters
Translated from German by Jake Schneider. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615045 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Born in 1973, Ron Winkler is one of the leading poets of his generation in Germany.
“In his poetry he demonstrates in a sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling way how an ever greater part of what in the previous century we used to call ‘reality’ for the sake of convenience, has been expanded and shrunk to a virtual universe in which the tactile and audible are constantly zapped, sampled, filtered and twittered. The consequence is that “on a word level, our thought collapses into fragmented, labyrinthine and ridiculously large-scale concepts”. —Ard Posthuma
Yang Lian Anniversary Snow
Winner of the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation
Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton,
Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton,
with additional translations by W.N. Herbert, George Szirtes,
Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson & others
Published 2019. Paperback, 156pp, 8 x 8ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848616707 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] English language only.
"If Yang Lian is new to you, I hope it spurs you on to read more of this extraordinary poet. If you have read him before, then you will find familiar themes here: the search for a mature wisdom, the need to readjust the balance between modernism and the classical heritage, the impossibility of giving easy solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in this world. There is also a new sense of his coming to terms with the devastating loss of his mother when he was a teenager, which is when he began writing poetry, as well as intimate and tenderly-voiced declarations of the power of love in its many forms. There is, too, a growing sense of poetry as a weapon in the fight to heal this planet of ours, so wounded by greed, war, exploitation and plunder.
This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." —Brian Holton, from the Afterword to this volume
Yang Lian (editor) A Massively Single Number — An Anthology
Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton. Bilingual.
Published 2015. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613768 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
In 2012, Yang Lian and others started an online poetry competition in China. They expected a good response, but were astounded to receive more than 85,000 entries, with unknown poets—earning their living as migrant workers—delivering up fine works in classical forms. This anthology offers some of the winning poems from the first two years of the competition, together with comments by the judges and essays by several of the people involved.
The cover features a design by Ai Weiwei.
W.N. Herbert & Yang Lian (eds.) The Third Shore
Chinese and English-language poets in mutual translation. Bilingual.
Published 2013. Paperback, 232pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613096 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here .]
Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets come together to translate each other's work.
Yang Lian Riding Pisces — Poems from Five Collections
Translated from Chinese by Brian Holton. Bilingual.
Published 2008. Paperback, 216pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $22
ISBN 9781905700912 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Riding Pisces brings together a number of hard-to-find and uncollected texts from almost the full extent of Yang Lian's career: from Masks and Crocodiles (Sydney, 1990 — although the translations here are new), from the out-of-print collection Non-Person Singular (London, 1994), from Notes of a Blissful Ghost , published in Hong Kong in 2002, from the Sailor's Home six-handed anthology (Shearsman Books, 2005), and from the as-yet uncollected Dark Blue Verses .
Yang Lian (ed.) Sailor's Home
Published 2005. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562863
A Sailor's Home suggests many years of travel, cross-cultural contacts, a place of rest after too much time spent on the high seas. This particular Sailor's Home is a record of a private poetry festival held in London in October 2005 at which six poets came together with a group of invited guests to read and discuss one other's work. This miscellany of the work written for the occasion is presented in the original languages and in English translation.
