Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and Other Poems: Parallel Text edition


César Vallejo - 1974
    Challenging, intense, and difficult to translate, Vallejo's work has often been overshadowed by his fervent endorsement of communism. Noted scholar Ilan Stavans tackles the avant- garde poet's politics head-on in an enlightening new introduction that places Vallejo in his proper literary context, while Margaret Sayers Peden's new translation does full justice to Vallejo's complex literary style. Including Spanish and English versions of more than eighty poems that span the arc of his career, this volume is certain to become the leading collection of Vallejo's work for years to come.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Orphic Songs


Dino Campana - 1914
    Charles Wright’s translation, Jonathan Galassi’s introduction, and, as afterword, Montale’s thoughtful essay on Campana, identify the heart of this poet’s achievement.

The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990


Charles Wright - 1990
    This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).

Collected Poems


James Schuyler - 1993
    This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Bending the Bow: Poetry


Robert Duncan - 1968
    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

Selected Poetry and Prose


Stéphane Mallarmé - 1982
    Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

Les Chimères


Gérard de Nerval - 1854
    Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by William Stone. A precursor of the symbolists and the surreallists, Gerard de Nerval has fascinated many major literary figures, including Proust and Breton, Eliot and Apollinaire, Michaux and Leiris. The great sonnet cycle, in its marvellous combination of spell, quest and dream, continues to fascinate writers, readers and that special category of writerly readers, translators. Menard's translator is the gifted young poet William Stone, who explains his work in a strongly worded essay: "like a partly submerged crocodile, with one amber eye half open, the foreign line sits, waiting for the anxious translator to make a move."

Naked Masks: Five Plays


Luigi Pirandello - 1952
    His modern and sensationally original plays dramatize with force and eloquence the isolation of the individual from society and from himself.The editor, Eric Bentley, is an international theater authority. In addition to the Introduction and the biographical and bibliographical material in the Appendices, Mr. Bentley has prepared for this volume the first English translations of the play Liolà and Pirandello's important "Preface" to Six Characters in Search of an Author.Included Plays: Liolà It Is So! (If You Think So) Henry IV Six Characters in Search of an Author Each in His Own Way

Fully Empowered


Pablo Neruda - 1962
    These thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics to characteristic Neruda odes to magnificent meditations on the office of poet, including poems that would undoubtedly claim a place in any selection of Neruda's greatest work. "The People" ("El Pueblo"), about the state of the working man in Chile's past and present, and the most celebrated of Neruda's later poems, completes this reflective, graceful collection.

Largo Desolato


Václav Havel - 1985
    Vaclav Havel gives us the comically absurd and seemingly autobiographical account of Professor Leopold Nettes, a revered but reluctant revolutionary whose most recent book has irked the totalitarian government in power. The authorities demand a retraction; his friends and fans clamor for heroic defiance. Besieged by onslaught of internal demons, whining lovers, suffocating followers, and ineffectual government thugs, the professor sinks nearer and nearer to crisis, unable to confront the conflicting demands that rule his life and leave him tormented by neurotic inertia. One of Havel's best-known plays, Largo Desolato vividly dramatizes the multiple contradictions of the intellectual trapped in a totalitarian nightmare.

Selected Poems


Zbigniew Herbert - 1977
    Doubly blessed is the English-reader, for in this volume he gets Zbigniew Herbert's work rendered by Czeslaw Milosz: like the poor, or better yet like nature herself, Polish genius takes care of its own.This collection of poems is bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate. For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor--in his case well-tempered and shining indeed--for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic norethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them frorn that poverty which every form of human eviI finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely.-- Joseph Brodsky

Poems 1913-1956


Bertolt Brecht - 1969
    The editing, with excellent notes, excerpts from Brecht's own views about poetry and Mr. Willett's concise introduction is exemplary. Most important, the translations by 35 poets, among them H.R. Hayes, Peter Levi, Christopher Middleton, and Naomi Replansky, maintain a high standard of accuracy and often convey a very clear idea of the texture and feeling of the German." --Stephen Spender, "The New York Times Book Review"

Selected Writings


Paul Valéry - 1950
    It concludes with excerpts from his creative writings such as Monsieur Teste and the drama Mon Faust.The list of translators for this volume is distinguished. Among them are Lionel Abel, Léonie Adams, Malcolm Cowly, James Kirkup, C. Day Lewis, Jackson Mathews, Louise Varese, and Vernon Watkins.

Station Island


Seamus Heaney - 1984
    Heaney's pilgrim is on an inner journey and proceeds through a series of dream encounters which lead him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called this narrative sequence "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years." It is preceded by a section of richly meditative lyrics ("Wry, spare, compressed, subtle, strange, they have a furtive intensity and exicitement." - Richard Ellmann, The New York Review of Books), and leads naturally into a third group of poems, in which the poet's voice is at one with the voice of the legendary Sweeney, a king of Ulster whose story Heaney translated from the Irish.

Complete Verse


Rudyard Kipling - 1988
    Included are both the familiar favorites and Kipling's lesser-known works. This is the only complete collection of Kipling's poems available in paperback.