Books in the Facing Pages series

Featuring English translations side-by-side with the originals, this volume contains the work of six of the most important modern and contemporary Dutch poets. Ranging in style from the rhetorical to the intensely lyrical, the work here includes examples of myth-influenced modernist verse, nature poetry, experimental poetry, and more.

The odes of Horace are the cornerstone of lyric poetry in the Western world. This work aims to bring all 103 odes into English in a series of translations while also illuminating the imagination of one of literary history's towering figures.

Provides the poets' personal glimpses into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood. This book features translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II who chart the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered.

This is the most comprehensive English translation of the work of Gunter Eich, one of the greatest postwar German poets. The author of the POW poem "e;Inventory,"e; among one of the most famous lyrics in the German language, Eich was rivaled only by Paul Celan as the leading poet in the generation after Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht. Expertly translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann, this collection gathers eighty poems, many drawn from Eich's later work and most of them translated here for the first time. The volume also includes the original German texts on facing pages. As an early member of "e;Gruppe 47"e; (from which Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll later shot to prominence), Eich (1907-72) was at the vanguard of an effort to restore German as a language for poetry after the vitriol, propaganda, and lies of the Third Reich. Short and clear, these are timeless poems in which the ominousness of fairy tales meets the delicacy and suggestiveness of Far Eastern poetry. In his late poems, he writes frequently, movingly, and often wryly of infirmity and illness. "e;To my mind,"e; Hofmann writes, "e;there's something in Eich of Paul Klee's pictures: both are homemade, modest in scale, immediately delightful, inventive, cogent."e; Unjustly neglected in English, Eich finds his ideal translator here.

Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle epoque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dali--who dubbed it the most "e;ungraspably poetic"e; work of the era--Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "e;It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires,"e; he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

Jaime Saenz is arguably the greatest Bolivian writer of the twentieth century. His poetry is apocalyptic, transcendent, hallucinatory, and brilliant. This title offers a translation of Saenz's work, "The Night", in English, which is the last he wrote before his death in 1986.

Reflects the influence not only of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. This title presents the poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French originals, which are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne that appeared in the original volume.