Books in the The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation series

"Cantigas are lyric poems in Galician-Portuguese, a language of the Iberian Peninsula, written and performed during the 13th and early 14th centuries. They are divided into three major genres: cantigas de amigo (songs in the voice of women), cantigas de amore (courtly love songs in the voice of men), and cantigas de escarho e mal dizer (joke and insult poetry). The cantigas de amigo, thought to be inspired by popular and indigenous women's songs, represent the largest body of woman-voiced poetry in Europe, although the surviving compositions are attributed to male poets. In this book, the award-winning translator Richard Zenith has revised, expanded, and retitled a volume of cantigas he first published in 1995, in the UK only, with Carcanet Press (113 Galician Portuguese Troubadour Poems, now OP). The new book includes 122 cantigas, including several new translations, with the original text on facing pages, and a new introduction to provide background and context"--

Meng Chiao developed an experimental poetry of virtuosic beauty, a poetry that anticipated landmark developments in the modern Western tradition by a millennium. With the T'ang Dynasty crumbling, Meng's later work employed surrealist and symbolist techniques as it turned to a deep introspection. This title presents the English work of his poetry.

"A complete facing-page translation of the Tarjuman, which consists of sixty-one poems composed between 1202 and 1215 CE and published in 1215 at the earliest. The first word of the title can refer to a translator, interpreter, or biographer, on the one hand, and to a translation, interpretation, or biography on the other"--

Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies a faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time.

One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. Night Journey is the English-language debut of the work that won Maria Negroni an Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams--dreams she renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and Calvino. In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality. Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between life and death. Night Journey reflects a mastery of a traditional form while brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural, multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a "e;medieval tabard"e; where a pelvis should be, a "e;lipless grin,"e; a "e;beach severed from the ocean."e; In one poem "e;nomadic cities"e; whisk past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's eyes. Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's "e;indomitable literary intelligence"e; subdues an unspoken terror--helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what it is can one discover its "e;hidden splendor,"e; the "e;invisible center of the poem."e; As readers of this magnificent work will discover, this is a journey that, because its every fleeting image conjures a thousand words of fertile silence, can be savored again and again.

Features seventy poems that are among the largest and most representative offering of Wislawa Szymborska's work with particular emphasis on the period since 1967. Describing Szymborka's poetry, this book shows that her verse is marked by high seriousness, delightful inventiveness, a prodigal imagination, and enormous technical skill.