Book picks similar to
The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry by Paul Auster
poetry
french
anthology
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The Penguin Book of French Poetry: 1820-1950; With Prose Translations
William Rees - 1991
His fresh and beautiful prose translations will re-open many half-forgotten doors, and stimulate new enthusiasms.
Country Music: Selected Early Poems
Charles Wright - 1982
From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.
Les Fleurs du Mal
Charles Baudelaire - 1857
Tableaux Parisiens condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. Le Vin centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of Fleurs du Mal while rebellion is at the heart of Révolte.
Illuminations
Arthur Rimbaud - 1875
They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.
Homage to the Lame Wolf: Vasko Popa - Selected Poems
Vasko Popa - 1979
The new version adds two sequences--"Give Me Back My Rage" and "Heaven's Ring"--as well as some previously unpublished sections of the justly famous series, "The Little Box." Simic and Popa are a perfect match. A book for surrealists, mythographers, postmodernists, scientists, and lovers of poetry and games. Winner of the PEN Translation Prize.
The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry: From Nerval to Valery in English Translation
Ángel Flores - 2000
The poetic and cultural tradition forged by the Symbolist poets -- Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Appollinaire, and others -- reverberated throughout the avant garde and counter-cultures of the twentieth century. Modernism, surrealism, abstract impressionism, and the Beat movement are unthinkable without the example of these poets and their theories of art, making this reissue possibly the hippest "dead white European male" anthology ever published.Including translations by Richmond Lattimore, W. S. Merwin, Dudley Fitts, and Richard Wilbur, this anthology has stood the test of time in terms of its selection and scholarly apparatus. Now back in print after twenty years in a fresh new edition, the book features an introduction by Patti Smith that testifies to its epochal impact on her own career, as well as those of other influential latter-day poets, including Lou Reed and Jim Carroll. This rediscovered gem is sure to inspire a new generation.
Alcools
Guillaume Apollinaire - 1913
Champion of "cubism," Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) fashions in verse the sonic equivalent of what Picasso accomplishes in his cubist works: simultaneity. Apollinaire has been so influential that without him there would have been no New York School of poetry and no Beat Movement. This new translation reveals his complex, beautiful, and wholly contemporary poetry. Printed with the original French on facing pages.
Selected Poems
Francis Ponge - 1994
Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry —Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil—as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Aimé Césaire - 1939
The long poem was the beginning of Cesaire's quest for negritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Cesaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. Andre Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to C saire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.
Poems and Translations
Ezra Pound - 2003
From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except "The Cantos." In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection "Hilda's Book" (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 "lost" manuscript. Pound's influential "Cathay" (1915), "Lustra" (1917), and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to "make it new," opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, "Poems and Translations" reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.
Ariel
Sylvia Plath - 1965
Her husband, Ted Hughes, brought the collection to life in 1966, and its publication garnered worldwide acclaim. This collection showcases the beloved poet’s brilliant, provoking, and always moving poems, including "Ariel" and once again shows why readers have fallen in love with her work throughout the generations.
The Collected Poems, 1975-2005
Robert Creeley - 2006
Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment--the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005" will stand together with "The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2000" as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.