Books

European Poetry in English Translation

Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology
Michael Hoffman (editor)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; August 2006

This groundbreaking anthology will serve as the standard for years to come. Editor Michael Hofmann has assembled brilliant translations of the major German poets, from Rilke and Brecht to Durs Grunbein and Jan Wagner, in an approachable, readable, and endlessly interesting collection. Here we find poetry as a living counter-force to socio-political reality; poetry of dissent and fear and protest; poetry of private grieves and musics. From the subtlety and elegance of Brecht, to the extraordinary jargon-glooms of Gottfried Benn, to the oblique and straightforward responses to the country's villainous history, to the bitter, cleansed, and haunted poetry of the postwar years, the anthology ends with a reunified country looking at itself and its neighbours in new ways. This is an essential and timely collection of verse from a tumultuous, violent, tragic, and hopeful century, written in the language of those who were at the heart of the matter.

Louise Labé: Complete Poetry & Prose
Deborah Lesko Baker (editor)
University of Chicago Press; April 2006

Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.

The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy
Aliki Barnstone
Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.; March 2006

A new translation of a poet widely considered one of the most important of the twentieth century. C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) has written some of the most powerful poems in history. His work uncannily translates history, the record of the many, into an individual personal document. Though Cavafy is wickedly satirical, many of his poems are located in a landscape of intimacy. Drawing on the spectrum of ancient Greek poetic tradition, his poetry is still internal, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boy who plans to enter politics or a poor, ostracised, pure and beautiful young man destroyed by poverty and priggish social mores. In these glimmering and lyrical translations, with an introduction and scholarly endnotes co-written with Willis Barnstone, Aliki Barnstone has been faithful to the original Greek, capturing both Cavafy's song and his vernacular in ways neglected in previous translations. Paying close attention to tone and diction, she has employed her well-tuned poet's ear, making Cavafy's verse breathe new music in English.

Compiled by SANYAT SATTAR

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