Books published by Contra Mundum Press

Born in 1925 in Transylvania into a Hungarian family, Lorand Gaspar grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, German, and also French, which would become the language in which he wrote. Endowed with many gifts, all of which he grandly used, Gaspar is a surgeon, a poet, and a writer of scientific and lyric prose in addition to a translator of Spinoza, Rilke, Seferis and others. Sol absolu et autres textes, edited and translated by Mary Ann Caws and Nancy Kline, contains abundant evidence of Gaspar's gifts: an autobiographical essay, a reflection on scientific and medical matters, and poems from diverse periods and places. Earth Absolute, the book's central text, is Gaspar's long love poem to "the naked song of the Judean mountains," which, he tells us, revealed itself to his "thirst on the pathways of Rock-strewn Arabia, desolate and blessed." The breadth and scope of his poetics is evident in the text's diversity, too, a complex synthesis of science, ancient history, medicine, geology, religion, archeology, linguistics, botany and more. This erudition is spatialized through Gaspar's lineation, making the poems almost vibrate on the page, resonating with his sensitivity to the vibration of the lands of which he writes. Also included herein is Gaspar's Fourth State of Matter, which received the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire in 1967, and sections from Approach of the Word, the writer's reflection on poetics. Gaspar is the recipient of numerous honors including the Grand prix de poésie de la Ville de Paris (1987), the Prix Mallarmé (1993), the Grand prix national de Poésie (1995), and the Prix Goncourt de la poésie (1998). Translated for the first time into English along with brief commentaries by the editors and translators, Lorand Gaspar's Earth Absolute & Other Texts conveys the scientific and lyrical mind and expression of one of France's genuinely nomadic poets.

Our Street, Sándor Tar's fifth book, is comprised of thirty-one stories centered on the inhabitants of Crooked Street, the tail end of a small village in southern Hungary bounded at one end by a down-and-out bar where most of the characters find their consolation in alcohol, banter, sex, yearning for love, and recounting far-flung tales. Each story of Our Street reflects on and extends the next, whereby a gallery of memorable characters emerge to reveal even more, an incisive portrait of a society in disintegration.Honing in on each character's struggle to salvage their self-respect after the demise of communism and the 1989 regime change, Tar dramatizes the difficulties of survival as the people of Crooked Street face the loss of their jobs, the soil from under their feet, and their hopes. This gallery of distinctive characters includes Uncle Vida, an old man who grows vegetables he cannot sell, the always proud Mancika, who is found lying on the tracks waiting for a speeding train, and the reverend Márton Végs¿, who tends to the needs of the villagers with an equanimity that springs from resignation rather than moral or spiritual resolve. Through these and other figures, one is drawn into a world both captivating and harrowing. Yet the stories are told with such humor, understanding, and sympathy that the book reaffirms the characters' humanity and endows them with dignity.Our Street takes us into terrain that most would not have known were it not for Sándor Tar. As the first translation into English of one of Tar's books, Anglophone readers will at last come to understand why many contemporary Hungarian authors have expressed unreserved admiration for his writing.

Featuring an extended introduction by scholar of British Romanticism, Alan Vardy, Fragments consists of Wordsworth's philosophico-aesthetic prose fragment "The Sublime & the Beautiful" and "Hawkshead & the Ferry." While a fragmented text, unfinished, almost certainly abandoned by the author, the difficulties of the former text no longer appear fatal so much as evidence of Wordsworth's rigorous struggle to come to terms not only with his own aesthetic experiences, but with the philosophical aesthetics of his epoch. What were once read as confusions may now be seen as productive of complex accounts of lived affective experiences. In critical terms, current aesthetic occupations have perhaps finally found Wordsworth's text.By placing the prose fragment in a separate appendix, the original editors of Wordsworth's Prose Works removed it from its actual place in The Unpublished Tour. New analysis of the manuscripts reveals that "The Sublime & the Beautiful" is actually part of the Tour. In reprinting the "Hawkshead & the Ferry" section of the Tour, our edition restores this original context, lost in the standard Oxford edition. The prose fragment begins in the precise place where "Hawkshead & the Ferry" ends - on the west side of Windermere looking north to the Langdale pikes. Were the missing pages of "The Sublime & the Beautiful" to be recovered, the transition from picturesque viewpoint to speculation on the philosophical status of that view would be apparent.Understanding the significance of our affective response to natural objects could not be more central to a Wordsworthian poetics predicated on the internalization of aesthetic sensations into perceptions and ideas, associations of one kind or another, and finally into the very stuff of the poetry. Fragmented or not, this prose treatise on a subject of such centrality to the poet's project can no longer be ignored. It is this general neglect that the present text hopes to address by publishing these fragments on their own for the very first time.

The Transformation Book, which belongs to Pessoa's pre-heteronymic period, contains a series of fragments written in English, Portuguese, and French, none of which were ever published during Pessoa's lifetime.Conceived by Pessoa in 1908, a year of great social and cultural transformation in Portugal, The Transformation Book was designed to reflect and advance social and cultural transformation in Portugal and beyond. Moving between a number of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and satire as well as essays on politics, philosophy, and psychiatry, The Transformation Book marks one of the fundamental stages in Pessoa's elaboration of a new conception of literary space, one that he came to express as a "drama in people." Alexander Search, Pantaleão, Jean Seul de Méluret, and Charles James Search are the four "pre-heteronyms" to which the texts of The Transformation Book are attributed. These four figures constitute a plural literary microcosm - a world that Pessoa makes, but that is occupied by a multiplicity of authors - and clearly anticipate the emergence of Pessoa's heteronyms. As the singular result of an intersection of Pessoa's personal intellectual trajectory with his hopes for fomenting cultural transformation, The Transformation Book makes for a unique contribution to Pessoa's ever-growing published oeuvre.Although some of the texts conceived as part of the Transformation Book have previously been published in isolation or as fragments, this is the first complete and critical edition of The Transformation Book, and most of the texts in this edition are published here for the first time. Through the critical efforts of Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, a fundamental project of Fernando Pessoa's is now brought from the confines of the archive to the public in its most complete and accurate fashion. The Transformation Book should contribute to future studies on the work of one of the most distinctive geniuses of modernist literature.

Unique in Hungarian literature, at the time of its first appearance in 1935, Towards the One & Only Metaphor was greeted with plaudits by such leading Hungarian critics as László Németh, András Hevesi, and Gábor Halász, with Németh declaring: "Szentkuthy's invention has the merit that he pries writing open in an entirely original manner. . . Where everything was wobbling the writer either joins the earth-shaping forces, or else he sets up his culture-building laboratory over all oscillations. Seated in his cogitarium, even in spite of himself, Szentkuthy is brother to the bellicose on earth in the same way as a cloud is a relative to a plow in its new sowing work."Szentkuthy referred to this nearly unclassifiable text as a Catalogus Rerum, "an index that is of entities and phenomena, a Catalogue of Everything in the Entire World." In a sequence of 112 shorter and longer passages, Szentkuthy has recorded his experiences and thoughts, reflected on his reading matter as well as political, historical, and erotic events, moving from epic subjectivity to ontological actualities: "Two things excite me: the most subjective epic details and the ephemeral trivialities of my most subjective life, in all their own factual, unstylized individuality - and the big facts of the world in their allegorical, Standbild-like grandiosity: death, summer, sea, love, gods, flowers."Similar in kind to the ruminative waste books of Lichtenberg and the journals of Joubert, while Towards the One and Only Metaphor is a fragmentary text, at the same time, it is ordered, like a group of disparate stars which, when viewed from afar, reveal or can be perceived to form a constellation - they are sculpted by a geometry of thought. Szentkuthy conjures up and analyzes spectacle and thought past and present with sensitivity, erudition, and linguistic force. As András Keszthelyi observed, the text is essentially something of a manifesto, "an explicit formulation of the author's intentions, his scale of values, or, if you wish: his ars poetica." Through dehumanization, Szentkuthy returns us to the embryo and the ornament, but so as to bring us into the very particles of existence. Towards the One and Only Metaphor is also a confessional, a laying bare of the heart, even through masks, but in moving beyond the torpid self-obsession that rules our age, Szentkuthy's revelations yield forth the x-ray of a typus, and like Montaigne and Rousseau, he is equally revealing, entertaining, and humorous. Now available in English for the first time, Towards the One & Only Metaphor is destined to stand as one of the principal works of world literature of the 20th century.

In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches, he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic, incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most significant European authors working today.

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul.This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by ¿thousands of philosophies,¿ all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoäs musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoäs future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a ¿poet animated by philosophy.¿ Through editor Nuno Ribeirös careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity¿s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.

Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final texts by the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self. This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. "If Ghérasim Luca's speech is eminently poetic," Deleuze pronounced, "it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T'AIME PASSIONNÉMENT." Transformed for the first time into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this bi-lingual edition of Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism. In addition, it is the first book of Luca's verse ever to be translated into English."Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own." -Deleuze "Mary Ann Caws' passionate translations render deft, delightful facets of the formidable Ghérasim Luca: virile servings of refreshment and tumult, liberating language from the yoke of Duty. This collection pairs and contrasts well with the churning self-surgery we had the pleasure of smuggling from Romanian. Self-Shadowing Prey calls for vertiginous reading, in exhilarating reflection of the sonorous scintillations of Luca's own reading performances." -Julian and Laura Semilian, translators of Ghérasim Luca's The Inventor of Love & Other Works

Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy''s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy''s Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, anendless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite.Through St. Orpheus'' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems."Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist''s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life & more his intellectual mission, the sole determinantof his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th centuryand its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary onCasanova''s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy''s very own philosophy of love.Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity anda taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Composed over 2,500 years, lost in the deserts of Iraq for 2,000 more, Gilgamesh presents a palimpsest of ancient Middle Eastern cultic and courtly lyrics and lore. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.Scholarly translations of Gilgamesh often dilute the expressive force of the material through overzealous erudition. Popular versions of the poem frequently gloss over gaps in the text with accessible and comforting, but ultimately falsely ecumenical language.In this new version, Stuart Kendall animates the latest scholarship with a contemporary poetic sensibility, inspired by the pagan worldview of the ancient work. Transcriptions of all of the available tablets and tales have been harnessed to present a fluid and holistic Gilgamesh, true to the archaic mind. This Gilgamesh is a poem of environmental encounter and, ultimately, ecological disaster. It is a contemporary poem rooted in the origins of our civilization, a record of the first break of light at the dawn of our consciousness."As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical¿as it has for several decades now¿each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall¿s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.¿¿Jerome Rothenberg

Italian writer/director Elio Petri (1929-1982) is of the cinematic era of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Bellocchio, and although he is recognized by film scholars as one of the major figures of Italian cinema, his work remains largely unknown outside of Italy. Hardly a marginal figure, Petri began as an assistant to Giuseppe De Santis and his future collaborators would include many of the most renowned film artists of the 20th century: Marcello Mastroianni, Gian Maria Volonté, Dante Ferretti, Ennio Morricone, Ugo Pirro, and Tonino Guerra.Due to Petri's belief that culture is inextricable from political struggle, he was a central figure in the fervent debates of his time on both Italian cinema and culture that arose from the aftermath of World War II to the 1980s. However, while generally characterized as a political filmmaker, this view is limited and reductive, for Petri's films are polemical interrogations of social, religious, and political phenomena as well as acute analyses of moral, psychological, and existential crises. His cinema is also informed by a rich and profound understanding of and engagement with literature, philosophy, psychology, and art, evident for instance in his adaptations of Sciascia's novels, Miller's The American Clock (for the stage), and Sartre's Dirty Hands, as well as in his use of Pop and Abstract Art in The Tenth Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country, and other films.Available for the first time in English, Writings on Cinema and Life is a collection of texts Petri originally published mainly in French and Italian journals. Also included are several art reviews, as well as Petri's essay on Sartre's Dirty Hands, a text forgotten until recently. Petri's affinity for subtle analysis is evident in his clear and precise writing style, which utilizes concrete concepts and observations, cinematographic references, and ideas drawn from literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. There is as well an acute and scathing sense of humor that permeates many of the texts. Petri was the recipient of the Palme d'Or, an Academy Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe award among many others, and in 2005 he was the subject of the documentary Elio Petri: Appunti Su Un Autore. This collection of Petri's writings is an important contribution to the history of cinema and offers further insight into the work, thought, and beliefs of one of cinema's most ambitious and innovative practitioners.

Plays with Films brings together texts of the final three productions of Richard Foreman¿s Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark¿s Church-in-the-Bowery: Zomboid! (2006), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! (2007), and Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (2008). In these three exhilarating and challenging works, Foreman turns to a meditation on the mechanical and digital reproductions of screen images within the discipline of theater, and thereby recalibrates and expands the potential relationship we can have with the live art that is theater.Extending the model of theater as a ¿reverberating machine,¿ Foreman¿s use of film in these plays is intimately integrated into the complex network of impulse generators, creating an unprecedented experience of multi-dimensional scriptural space, a new kind of total theater that effectively recharges and redirects the issues of consciousness he has been exploring with indefatigable intensity since the establishment of his theater in 1968. The bodied reality of theatrical experience, and the recognition of unconsciousness within that experience, becomes more fraught with peril in today¿s screened world. These plays, originally conceived as his final theater works (though he did change his mind), engage in ways that continue his ambition to upend habitual thinking and may prove transformative for the individual¿s ability to interpret and understand the threats of deadening conformity and loss of identity through the new digital culture.Employing an innovative typographical presentation, Plays with Films demonstrates how Americäs most daring theater artist alchemizes reproducible and non-reproducible reality into a unique contemplation of the project of self-construction in the 21st century.