Search results for ""author eliot weinberger""

This exquisitely composed photo-novel by French artist-writer Anouck Durand (born 1975)—collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines—tells a true story that begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel after Communism crumbles. When the Nazis invaded Albania, teenage partisan Refik Veseli’s Muslim family hid Jewish photographer Mosha Mandil, his wife and two small children. Despite the dire circumstances, Mosha instilled in Refik a great passion for photography, and a friendship was forged in the crucible of war. After liberation, the Mandils left for Israel, inviting Refik to join them, but he stayed behind to contribute to his new nation, not knowing he’d never see his dear friend again. In a nuanced, wholly imagined story, Durand inhabits Refik’s voice as he narrates his journey to China where—free of Albanian state censors—he attempts to mail a letter to Mosha. She also reveals how photography, used at the behest of merciless state powers, becomes a tool for liberation and human connection. Says Richard McGuire, author of Here: "A timely book about dictatorships, propaganda and friendship. Imagine Art Spiegelman meets Chris Marker, told in gorgeous tricolor photography, a knock out!"

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A book-length poem by our best living literary essayist (Forrest Gander).

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For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing. In Karmic Traces, his third collection with New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author’s personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the hand-over to China, as well as on imagined voyages on a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And in “The Falls,” the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncovering the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence.

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Presented in Eliot Weinberger's excellent new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure" (Sagetrieb). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the end of the poem the first six lines are written again), Sunstone is a tour de force of momentum. It takes as its structural basis the circular Aztec calendar, which measured the synodic period of the planet Venus (584 days—the number of lines of Sunstone). But, as The New Republic noted, "this esoteric correlative design...does not circumscribe its subject. [It is] a lyrically discursive exploration of time and memory, of erotic love, or art and writing."

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Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material." Excerpts: It was given to me, in the nineteenth century, to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments; and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum. — Lydia Davis Bad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catches under the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped on a sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us like a snow-drift. — Eliot Weinberge

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A milestone of modern poetry, American history comes to life in the actual words of victims and criminals in its courts.Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem sets forth a stark panorama of late 19th and early 20th century America—the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease.In radically stripped-down language of tremendous intensity, Reznikoff’s poem is an unforgettable reading experience. This edition also includes Reznikoff’s prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by critic and essayist Eliot Weinberger.

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Like A New Sun features poetry from Huastecan Nahuatl, Isthmus Zapotec, Mazatec, Tsotsil, Yucatec Maya, and Zoque languages. Co-edited by Isthmus Zapotec poet Victor Teran and translator David Shook, this groundbreaking anthology introduces six indigenous Mexican poets--three women and three men--each writing in a different language. Well-established names like Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) appear alongside exciting new voices like Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque). Each poet's work is contextualized and introduced by its translator. Foreword by Eliot Weinberger. Poets include Victor Teran (Isthmus Zapotec), Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque), Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec), Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya), Juan Hernandez (Huastecan Nahuatl), and Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil).

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in the mirror there is always this moment this moment leads to the door of rebirth the door opens to the sea the rose of time —Bei Dao The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China’s most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao’s entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages.

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Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost living poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)—here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger—made its appearance. This is followed by the complete texts of Days and Occasions (Días Hábiles), Homage and Desecrations (Homenaje y Profanaciones), Salamander (Salamandra), Solo for Two Voices (Solo a Dos Voces), East Slope (Ladera Este), Toward the Beginning (Hacza el Comienzo), Blanco, Topoems (Topoemas), Return (Vuelta), A Draft of Shadows (Pasado en Claro), Airborn (Hijos del Aire), and Paz's most recent collection, A Tree Within (Árbol Adentro). With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson.

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The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth’s loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, “Eliot Weinberger’s commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei’s little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility.”

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The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz’s poetry to span his entire writing career from his first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new translations based on Paz’s final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Weinberger—who has been translating Paz for over forty years—The Poems of Octavio Paz also includes translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Readers will also find Weinberger’s capsule biography of Paz, as well as notes on many poems in Paz’s own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his long and singular life.

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