Poetry Translations: Authors from Abiz to Pato
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Alireza Abiz The Kindly Interrogator
Translated from Persian by W.N. Herbert, with the author. English only.
Published 2021. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617704 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Alireza Abiz is a multi-award-winning Iranian poet, literary scholar, and translator. Born in South Khorasan, Iran in 1968, Abiz studied English Literature in Mashhad and Tehran universities and received his PhD in Creative Writing–Poetry from Newcastle University in the UK. Abiz has written extensively on Persian contemporary literature and culture. His scholarly book Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Politics and Culture since 1979 was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. He has so far published five collections of poetry in Persian, the latest of which (2017) 2017 was awarded the most prestigious independent poetry award in Iran, the Shamlou Award. His sixth collection The Desert Monitor will be published this year.
Anne-Marie Albiach
Two Poems: Flammigère & The Line ... The Loss
Translated from French by Peter Riley. English only,
Published 2004, A5 chapbook, 28pp. ISBN 9780907562412. Out of print.
Still available in a downloadable e-book version by clicking on this link.
Anne-Marie Albiach, who died in 2013, was one of France's leading avant-garde poets of the post-war era. Although much of her work has been translated and published in the USA, little has so far been made available in Britain. This chapbook unites two texts from very early and very late in her career: Flammigère
was her first book, a long poem published as a limited edition by Siècle à Mains in 1967 in London, where she was then living; 'La ligne . . . la perte' appeared in 1999 in a festschrift volume dedicated to fellow-poet Claude Royet-Journoud and was otherwise uncollected in France until a new collection appeared in 2005. This poem shows interesting parallels to the much earlier work. Flammigère
was never collected in any of Ms. Albiach's French volumes and she always declined permission for its republication. She did however permit an Italian translation and, then, this English translation. Flammigère
has since been collected in the author's posthumous collected poems, Cinq le choeur
(Flammarion, 2014).
Guillaume Apollinaire Seated Woman
Translated from French by Timothy Mathews
Published 2023. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $22.
ISBN 9781848618381 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that is the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In the accompanying memoir to his English translation of
Seated Woman , Timothy Mathews gives a wide-ranging account of the ways Apollinaire interacted in his life and art with Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, and the subjective as well as social experiences involved in urban modernism. In its scattered but controlled composition and the multiplicity of its tones,
Seated Woman , published posthumously in 1920, is a powerful counterpoint to the multi-faceted poetry for which Apollinaire is often better known. In playing the music of violence and generosity in the Great War and beyond, it is a story for its time, for our time, and any time. Apollinaire’s writing as a whole is a living testament to the extraordinary creative energy he both witnessed and produced, but also his understanding of its vulnerability to exploitation and decay. This book in turn seeks to honour that understanding, its persistent calls to the imagination, and the wit, vision and honesty that await readers of Apollinaire’s unique voice.
Alberto Arvelo Torrealba Florentino and The Devil
Translated from Spanish by Timothy Adès, with Gloria Carnevali. Bilingual edition.
Published 2014. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613485 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Florentino and the Devil, a famous poem in Venezuela, is the story of a poetic duel, a contrapunteo, between Florentino, a llanero
(a cattleman of the plains) and The Devil. Singing to a traditional joropo accompaniment on harp, four-stringed guitar and maracas, the contenders improvise rapid rhymes, trading thrust and counterthrust like swordsmen, showing off their mastery and boasting of their accomplishments, each trying to reduce the other to silence.
María Baranda Ficticia
Translated from Spanish by Joshua Edwards. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611238 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ficticia
was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice....
María Baranda Nightmare Running on a Meadow of Absolute Light
Translated from Spanish by Paul Hoover. Bilingual edition.
Published May 2017. Paperback, 94pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615434 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
María Baranda is one of the leading Mexican poets of the generation born in the 1960s. Her work has received Mexico’s distinguished Efraín Huerta and Aguascalientes national poetry prizes, as well as Spain’s Francisco de Quevedo Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She is increasingly known for her sweeping and incisive long poems and book-length projects, and this volume contains two such works: 'To Tell' and the title poem.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer Collected Poems — Rimas
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith. Bilingual edition.
Edited by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2007. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 184pp, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 978-0-907562-65-2 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was one of Spain's most important poets of the 19th century, and the instigator of a new Spanish version of Romanticism, influenced by German models such as Heine. Born in Seville in 1836, the son of an artist of Flemish origin, he lived only 34 years but in that time created a hugely influential body of verse (his Rimas, or Rhymes) as well as several short fictions (the Leyendas, or Legends).
Ilhan Berk Madrigals
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.
Published 2008. Paperback, 104 pp, 8x5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Madrigals
is a collection of poems by Turkey's leading experimental poet, an 89-year-old still at the height of his powers. With spare texts, sometimes with only a few words to a page, this collection has a powerful meditative quality, even as the words trail away into silence and the whiteness of the page.
Ilhan Berk The Book of Things
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 336pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £14.95 / $24
ISBN 9781848614628 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Unparalleled in the English language, The Book of Things, Berk's uniquely compelling lyric trilogy, is an uncommon meditation on the inner life of common things. Mud, bras, slugs and doors – Berk sings them all in this twisting, labyrinthine song of the strange and sensual, by turns playful and surprising, learned and hilarious, beautiful and unsettling in its quirkiness.
Berk's tireless journey into the unknown, The Book of Things
is a testament to the poet's undying appetite for engagement and renewal, his perennial call to awakening.
Ilhan Berk New Selected Poems 1947-2008
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 200pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848614611 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ilhan Berk (1908-2008) has been called a literary Midas: everything he touched turned to poems. New Selected Poems
shows us the full linguistic range and imaginative power of Turkey’s greatest experimental poet. With a large selection of poems drawn from over 60 years of work, New Selected Poems
offers a unique and indispensable portal into the world of Ilhan Berk. Berk’s poems quiver and spark with a language always pressing out against its own skin: sensual, erotic, strange and intimate, relaxed and humorous; poems in which smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and touch become the preludes for a reawakening of history, the body, the very world around us. If Berk himself was concerned with re-engaging a lost sensory world, then for many this volume will be a journey of discovery.
Hanne Bramness Weight of Light
Translated from Norwegian by Frances Presley, with the author. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 82pp, 8 x 5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615465 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“She tries to conjure up places and situations which normal language does not reach, from which it has disappeared, and then let something unheard communicate with us across a distance for which we have no words. (…) What she adds is her fabulous gift of making her material physical.” —Hadle Oftedal Andersen, Klassekampen
“Hanne Bramness’ own voice gently finds its way through a common language, not as insistence but as a presence, where the spontaneous warmth of feeling and intellectual distance balance each other.” —Lennart Sjögren, Lyrikvännen
Hanne Bramness No Film in the Camera
Translated from Norwegian by Frances Presley, with the author. English only.
Published 2013. Paperback, 94pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612686 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]
ISBN 9781848612686 [Download a sample PDF from this book here]
Uten film i kameraet
(No film in the camera) is a collection of prose poems about photographs by professional photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Francesca Woodman, Bill Brandt, Letticia Battaglia and Jitka Hanzlová—and also about personal photos and recollections of photos, about what photographs reveal and conceal.
Hanne Bramness Salt on the Eye – Selected Poems
Translated from Norwegian by the author & Frances Presley. English only.
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700417 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Hanne Bramness is one of Norway's leading poets, and a winner of the prestigious Dobloug Prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy. She is also well-known in her native country for her translations of English-language poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Selima Hill, as well as the Estonian poet Marie Under.
Aleksandrs Čaks Selected Poems
Translated from Latvian by Ieva Lesinska-Geibere. English only.
Published 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615571 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Čaks (1901-50) is Latvia’s leading mid-20th-century poet, an early adopter of modern literary tendencies from wider Europe, and one of the first really urban poets in the Latvian language – until his eruption onto the scene, Latvian poetry had been grounded in rural life, reflecting the preponderance of Latvian speakers in the countryside, compared to the large German- (and later Russian- ) speaking population in the cities. His first book appeared in 1928, and he threw himself into the Riga literary scene by creating a magazine devoted to younger writers. He made a living by teaching and through magazine journalism. This is the first book devoted to his work in Britain.
Luís Vaz de Camões The Lusiads
Shearsman Classics No. 29. Translated from Portuguese by Sir Richard Fanshawe. English only.
Published 2021. Paperback, 376pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $32
ISBN 9781848616790 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Lusiads is Camões’ masterpiece and to all intents and purposes his attempt at a Portuguese founding narrative along the lines of the Aeneid, dealing with the rise of Portugal as a maritime power, rather than the rise of Rome. Fittingly, the major presence in these pages is the great navigator, Vasco de Gama. Fanshawe completed his masterly translation while under house arrest at his family estate, during the Cromwellian interregnum, and it is one of the great English literary translations of the 17th century. It holds up particularly well today against more modern versions.
Luís Vaz de Camões Selected Shorter Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 30. Translated from Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin. Bilingual edition.
With an introduction by Jorge de Sena & an essay by Hélder Macedo.
Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616769 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
This companion volume to
The Lusiads
(see above) brings together all of Jonathan Griffin’s translations of Camões’ shorter poems — mostly sonnets and
redondilhas
.
Magda Cârneci A Deafening Silence
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin, Madalina Banucu & the author. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 94pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615564 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A Deafening Silence
is the first UK publication by one of Romania’s leading contemporary poets. Selecting poems from over twenty years’ output, this bilingual volume offers an ideal introduction to her work.
Magda Cârneci is also an art essayist and prose writer, and currently lives between Paris and Bucharest. A member of the well-known “Generation of the ’80s” in Romanian literature, she became actively involved in the political and cultural Romanian scene after the 1989 Revolution. At present she is president of PEN Club Romania, and is also a member of the European Cultural Parliament.
Yolanda Castaño Second Tongue
Translated from Galician by Keith Payne. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848616578 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Yolanda Castaño writes love poems which are not tearful. Her love belongs to mysterious strangers from different continents and languages. She is never pedantic. She loves skipping […] between lines of her poems, between images and metaphors, between being frank and being mischievous.
The reader asks: ‘Can’t you decide between being frank and being mischievous?’ And the poet answers: ‘No, I can’t. Because this is not a treatise, not a schoolbook, not a scholarly article. It’s poetry, it’s art. It’s about skipping and leaping. It’s about singing all the way to Land’s End, in good and bad weather.’ Yolanda Castaño’s poems are like champagne … Read her poems and you’ll be jumping too.”
—Adam Zagajewski
Rosalía de Castro Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish and Galician by Michael Smith. Bilingual edition.
Published 2007. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700448. [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The founding mother of modern Galician poetry, Rosalía de Castro (1837-1883) wrote her last collection in Spanish, and this volume covers her work in both languages. A much-needed bilingual volume which introduces a major figure in Iberian poetry to English & American readers. The translations are by the prize-winning Irish poet-translator, Michael Smith, whose own poetry is also published by Shearsman Books and whose co-translations of César Vallejo for Shearsman have been justly celebrated.
C.P. Cavafy Complete Plus — The Poems of C.P. Cavafy in English
Translated from Greek by George Economou with Stavros Deligiorgis. English only.
Published 2013. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612662 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
This book contains 162 poems: the 154 canonical Collected Poems, presented by year and within each year's order of composition and/or first printing, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems
interspersed chronologically among them. Only one of his rejected, early poems has been included, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street,' used here as a kind of overture to the collection.
María do Cebreiro I am not from here
Translated from Galician by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848611115 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
María do Cebreiro is a widely-acclaimed Galician-language poet and critical theorist. In March 2008 she was invited by the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales to be the first Galician Writer in Residence at Bangor University. Some of the poems included in this book were first written during the author's stay in North-Wales, where her translator, Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, also lives and works.
María do Cebreiro The Desert
Translated from Galician by Keith Payne. Bilingual.
Published 2019. Paperback, 70pp, 8 x 8ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616240 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"The majority of these poems exist thanks to a convalescence that lasted half a year and that, like the practice of Hesychasm, forced me to become quiet, solitary and silent.
In the writing of this book I was very inspired by the audio-visual piece Et la guerre est a peine comencée
(And the war has only just begun), from Tiqunn Collective, who I had first heard about thanks to the publisher and philosopher Roberto Abuín. The voice-over in the film recalls the profound but unstable connection between the world's will to distance, and the creation of community. The first hermits set out alone but eventually found each other in the middle of the desert. As we learn from Deleuze, nomadism is not a refutation of the centre, but the recognition that life moves and we need to be quick to catch it." —María do Cebreiro
Mercedes Cebrián Affordable Angst — Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Published 2022. Paperback, 144pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
Published 2022. Paperback, 144pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618244 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Mercedes Cebrián is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food, décor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game/ from my child-hood: trees, houses, cars,/ tiny people with fixed smiles, lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and decisions taken for you/ on the little question-cards
she writes in the poem ‘City now or soon’, but the day-to-day of the shiny new Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and in her surreal, rapid, darkly funny, lyrical poems she proves adept at putting her finger in society’s wounds. Cebrián is one of the most fascinating and original voices in current Spanish poetry.
Jorge Humberto Chávez: I'd ask you to join me by the Río Bravo and weep but you should know neither river nor tears remain
Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. English only
Published 2016. Paperback, 86pp, 9.21 x 6.14ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615151 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is a translation of Chávez's prize-winning Mexican volume (Te diría que fuéramos al Río Bravo a llorar pero debes saber que ya no hay río ni llanto) from 2013, a book of poems that deals with life on the border, its dangers, its delights and its peculiarities.
Jorge Humberto Chávez was born in Ciudad Juárez, on the US/Mexican border in 1959. Since 1980, he has published eight collections of poetry in Mexico, the current volume being the most recent.
Antonio Cisneros A Cruise to the Galapagos Islands
Translated from Spanish by William Rowe. English only.
Published 2013. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612693 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. (Translations only).]
A Cruise to the Galapagos Islands
(Un crucero a las Islas Galápagos) was the last book published by Antonio Cisneros before his death in 2012. The book has the subtitle, New Marian Songs (nuevos cantos marianos) and consists of 25 prose poems that invoke the Virgin as protector in danger, not in order to escape from fear but so as to traverse the zones of greatest anxiety, without turning the gaze away from catastrophe. The themes of shipwreck, illness, and death occur alongside intense alertness of the skin to the prick of an insulin injection, the feel of salt on things that flash through the slit of a skirt, or the body sensitized to the prickle of a woolly blanket on a hot night. This absolute physical aliveness causes the image of the Virgin to give way to a shipwrecked man's vision of a bar with pints of beer floating towards him over the sea.
Jeannette L. Clariond The Goddesses of Water / Las diosas del agua
Translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee. Bilingual edition.
Published 2021. Paperback, 144pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617612 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
23 August 2021 (13 August in the Julian calendar used at the time) marks the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Spanish conquistadors – accomplished with the significant aid of indigenous allies from Tlaxcala, an important smaller polity treated brutally by the Aztecs, and following a tragic smallpox epidemic inadvertently caused by the newcomers – and the beginning of Spanish suzerainty in what is now Mexico. "Significant aid" indeed: in the final battle for Tenochtitlán, the Spanish military forces numbered less than a thousand, and their indigenous allies are reported to have numbered up to 150,000. A glorious, if decidedly alien, culture was all but obliterated in the wake of the victory, and one of the world's greatest cities reduced to ruins. In this volume Jeannette Clariond harks back to the female pantheon of the Aztec religion, awakening memories of a past obscured by 500 years of overwriting.
Paul Claudel Break of Noon / Le partage de midi
Edited by Anthony Rudolf.
Translated from French by Jonathan Griffin, David Furlong, John Naughton & Susannah York. English only.
Published 2021. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
Translated from French by Jonathan Griffin, David Furlong, John Naughton & Susannah York. English only.
Published 2021. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848617551 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Break of Noon
(Partage de midi) is a collaborative attempt, edited by Anthony Rudolf, at preparing an English-language edition of Paul Claudel’s remarkable and complex play, an unstable text which gave Claudel many problems throughout his life. These are explored in essays by David Furlong of Exchange Theatre in London, which put on a production of the play in 2018, and John Naughton, a leading authority on Claudel. The critical apparatus is completed by the late Susannah York’s essay on her own involvement with the play and recounts her interaction with her fellow translator, Jonathan Griffin. The instability of this strange and compelling work in its various original versions is mirrored by the three critical essays in the present work, which do not always see eye to eye. It is thirty years since Jonathan Griffin died and nearly fifty years since Pierre Rouve’s Ipswich production of Jonathan’s translation, which “starred” the then unknown Ben Kingsley and Annie Firbank.
Elsa Cross Selected Poems
Edited by Tony Frazer. English only.
Translated from Spanish by Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Ruth Fainlight,
John Oliver Simon, Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2009. Paperback, 126pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700479 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Elsa Cross (b. 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English—a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work—ranging from the remarkable 'Bacchantes', which dates from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through 'Malabar Canto'—suffused with the spirit of India—to the odes, dithyrambs and elegies of the recent Greek-inflected works. Elsa Cross' work is typified by its strong metaphysical orientation, coupled with a dazzling surface and remarkable imagery, and offers the English-speaking reader a new experience. A poetry to be savoured, thanks to the efforts of the five translators at work here, all of whom worked closely with the author to bring these poems successfully across the language barrier.
Elsa Cross Beyond the Sea
Translated from Spanish by Anamaría Crowe Serrano
Published 2016. Paperback, 152pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613997 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Beyond the Sea
brings together two book-length sequences first published in Mexico in the early years of the century, both taking their origins from Greece, a matter of central importance for the poet for many years. Fittingly, for subject-matter thoroughly drenched in the Greek past, the poems are odes and dithyrambs; the gods are there, imagery that has echoed across the centuries is here transposed into a limpid modern Mexican poetry, composed with the lightest of touches. Here the Mayans of Bonampak meet the Minoans of Knossos, united across the centuries and thousands of miles by their preservation in wall-paintings, and by their observer. Here the gods meet our gaze, and come forth, raised from the ashes of history. They are no dead; they are not forgotten; they have merely been sleeping only to be awoken by the poet. Elsa Cross is one of the most important living Mexican poets, and this fine translation does her work spectacular justice.
Elsa Cross Amorgos Notebook
Translated from Spanish by Luis Ingelmo & Tony Frazer. Bilingual edition.
Published 2018. Paperback, 100pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614833 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Amorgos Notebook (Cuaderno de Amorgós)
is a collection from 2007 that won for Elsa Cross Mexico’s most prestigious poetry prize, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, especially valued by its recipients as the winner is chosen by her peers in the literary world. Elsa Cross’ work over the past several decades has demonstrated a considerable fascination with Greece, and this sequence takes its departure from the island of Amorgos, in the Cyclades, home of remarkable ancient sculptures, and spectacular terrain.
Elsa Cross Bomarzo
Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. Bilingual edition.
Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616509 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The open mouth of the Orcus, in the front-cover photograph, represents an entrance to the underworld, according to all the symbolism embedded in the Gardens of Bomarzo, built in the 16th Century, in central Italy. And this book actually seems to play with different strata of reality and perception, as well as different states of the mind – as well as the soul. It proceeds from the concrete to the oneiric; from the past, constantly weighting down the present, to the timeless moment that perhaps in the final poems gives meaning to – or annihilates – all the dense phantasmagoria that courses through its pages.
Rubén Darío Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Adam Feinstein. Bilingual edition.
Published 2020. Paperback, 156pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the Nicaraguan poet and founder of the literary movement known as modernismo
– somewhat akin to French symbolisme
– died more than a century ago, but his influence on Spanish-language poetry remains immense. Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, César Vallejo, Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, among many others, acknowledged their debt. Borges declared: ‘Darío was an innovator in everything: subject matter, vocabulary, metre, the peculiar magic of certain words …We can truly call him the Liberator.’
Darío’s influence on Hispanic poetry is enormous: he is the conduit into Spanish for the most forward-looking kind of French poetry of his time, his own major influences including Hugo and Verlaine, and his relentless exploration of new metrical possibilities opened up fresh options for what was an ossified tradition at the time he erupted onto the scene.
Pietro De Marchi Reports After the Fire: Selected Poems
Translated from Italian by Peter Robinson
Published 2022. Paperback, 186pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848617988 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Pietro De Marchi was born in Seregno, Milan, in 1958, and has lived and worked for much of his life in Zurich. A widely published critic and editor of scholarly editions, he is the author of two volumes of imaginative prose and three extensive collections of poetry, from which Reports after the Fire: Selected Poems
generously draws, adding a section of uncollected work. The two key poles of De Marchi’s life place him firmly within the tradition of the so-called Lombard Line, including poets such as Vittorio Sereni and Luciano Erba, whose work is characterised by an acute attention to their immediate surroundings, settings evoked with strong affective bonds and acutely turned historical ironies. De Marchi has affinities, too, with Giorgio Orelli and Fabio Pusterla, poets from the Italian-speaking area of southern Switzerland who share aesthetic principles with their Milanese allies. The poems translated in Reports after the Fire
are distinguished by a clear-focused attention to the lives of others, especially children, to the intersections of language and identity, location and sensibility, clarifying and sharing experiences of displacement and survival which De Marchi evokes with a finely tuned ear for idiom, allusion and cadence, poems in which, as Giorgio Orelli put it, ‘the soul seems to expand into all that we look at and are looked at by, in a sort of strange holiday.’
Pablo de Rokha: Architecture of Dispersed Life — Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Urayoán Noel. Bilingual edition.
Published 2018. Paperback, 292pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24
ISBN 9781848613775 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Pablo de Rokha was one of the great Chilean modernists, but he is arguably known more for his feud with Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro than for his vast and remarkable poetry. De Rokha is relatively unknown outside Chile, and this volume redresses that by offering an introduction to this astonishing body of work, the first comprehensive selection in English. Daniel Borzutkzy calls this book "an event, a monumental work of translation and poetry that will force us to rethink our understanding of global modernism and the hemispheric avant-garde."
Winétt de Rokha: The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere — El valle pierde su atmósfera
Translated from Spanish by Urayoán Noel. Bilingual edition.
Published 2021. Paperback, 114pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848617834 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere
is the final collection by Chilean poet Winétt de Rokha. A book of 48 poems written during a journey across Latin America, it is a canto americano, an epic poem that sings of a united América through its land and peoples. The poems give attention to the land and social conditions, mentioning the “banana plantations, rubber plantations, farmlands that produce bloodsuckers”, the indigenous peoples, local fauna and flora, and popular protests like the Baltimore Workers’ Congress. Winétt proposes a new kind of language and a new kind of person, within new economic structures. She does so through the performance of a neobaroque rhetoric that mirrors the América she finds, with a mottled variety to it, a “convulsive labyrinth, uneven, baroque, communicating”, with “jumbled qualities”. Winétt’s introductory poem announces her intention to create a “song of gold dust” and a “strophe of the day’s necessity”. “The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere is incorruptibly American,” she proclaims. As the critic Javier Bello puts it: “The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere
is a book that will require many readings to give an account of its complexity and restore it to the place I believe it should have held—and should still hold—in contemporary Chilean poetry, as one of its most intense and particular moments.”
Jordi Doce Nothing Is Lost — Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. English only.
Published 2017. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615304 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"This volume brings together poems from six collections originally published between 1990 and 2011. I have divided the selection into five sections that correspond, broadly, to the separate stages in which they were written. The final and briefest one includes five fragments from Perros en la playa
[Dogs on the Beach], a miscellany of prose, poetry and aphorisms that I published in early 2011.
In my opinion, a Selected
should not solely contain poems that have been often anthologised or singled out for praise by critics and readers. It should give a more or less accurate view of the variety and development of one’s output over the years. Therefore, I have not shied away from including some youthful pieces or the odd experiment—not to mention poems for which one feels an immoderate fondness, which no amount of critical scrutiny can ever hope to dispel." —Jordi Doce
Jordi Doce We Were Not There
Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. Bilingual edition.
Published 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616813 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Unforgettable poems that, on the verge of tales and fables, drag the reader toward a universe of screened images, like ‘pollen clouds in the slant evening light.’” —Antonio Ortega, El País
“Jordi Doce is one of the three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure. He brings all his faculties to the rich task of being; his voice inhabits the names, not just with wonder, but with new possibilities; like Machado, on the one hand, and Montale, on the other, he is a companion, not a guide, always present with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way.”
—John Burnside
Jordi Doce Master of Distances
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Published February 2023. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. Bilingual edition.
ISBN 9781848618862 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Selected as Best Poetry Book of 2022 in Spain by El Cultural.
Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments fluctuating between dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the bleakness of ageing, and accompanying the loved one through a long and debilitating illness. The continuity of mood and imagery gradually melds the fragments into a single poem. The poet stumbles confusedly as through a labyrinth of feeling and sensation. Who or what is the mysterious master of distances of the title? Time? Language? Oneself? The answer is a radical experiment in poetry and a new departure for this fine lyric poet.
Terence Dooley (ed. / trans.) Ten Contemporary Spanish Women Poets
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848617223 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
This is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and features ten poets: Pilar Adón, Martha Asunción Alonso, Graciela Baquero, Mercedes Cebrián, María Eloy-García, Berta García Faet, Erika Martínez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero — six born in the 1970s, three in the 1980s, and one in the 1960s.
Ukrike Draesner this porous fabric: Selected Poems
Translated from German by Iain Galbraith. Bilingual.
Published 2022.
Paperback, 228pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25.
ISBN 9781848617858 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ulrike Draesner is recognised as one of Germany’s most important living poets, as well as being an original and daring writer of fiction. Her poetic language, recorded where breath and script meet, can unsettle conventional reading modalities: its orthography refuses to capitalise; its punctuation – if the stops and starts may be called that – is rarely executed by comma or period; its sequentialities, shunning the comfort of bespoke narrative, undermining the reliability of marching lines and subaltern clauses, are born at the intersection of worldly impulse and bodily pulse, vulnerable to the loops of memory. Her writing favours an exchange with the reader that explores unfamiliar modes of encountering the world to form the sociable space of a poem. Her work is charged with a delicious, inquisitive restlessness. Visually acute, her poems are keen to discover, reflect on and body forth complex blendings of thought, sound, smell and image, delivering a revealing diffraction to the reader’s ear.
Du Fu Spring in the Ruined City — Selected Poems
Translated from Chinese by Jonathan Waley. Bilingual edition, with Chinese text in calligraphy.
Published 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610002 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) is celebrated as the greatest moment in Chinese poetry, a time when poetry was highly rated, and some of China's most famous poets were writing. Du Fu (712–770 AD) is widely regarded as the greatest of these. He himself wrote that he aimed to startle his readers, and in some of his more avant-garde poems he combines and contrasts images in a way that has an almost modernist feel to it. On the other hand, he also enjoyed and celebrated the simple pleasures in life, and his (apparently) lighter poems about friendship and his natural surroundings show this clearly.
George Economou Unfinished & Uncollected
Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614369 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Partly an addendum to George Economou’s versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, published by Shearsman in 2013, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself.
"Invaluable as they are, these retrieved Cavafy poems at moments seem a prologue to Economou's own, so deeply has he assimilated, in the course of decades of translation, both the older poet and the store of Greek classic poetry in which he also was invested. But the very American wit and formal hijinks are Economou's own, as are the grace, for instance, of an epithalamion that Sappho might have sung—this isn't pastiche, but a bringing of past into present, as Cavafy did, and also of present into past. This is the stance of irony, which demands a double vision. As its final gift this eloquent book treats us to a fractured narrative of the poet's education in the irony that is and has been an essential armament of survival for those in both his benighted lands." —Mark Weiss
Tsvetanka Elenkova The Seventh Gesture
Translated from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610842 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The most striking image of extreme eros and extreme pain is that of Christ on the Cross. This book of 77 poems by the Bulgarian author Tsvetanka Elenkova navigates between these two extremes. The poems are like a pulsation, or a gesture, and don't take a breath. In this sense, there is no space or silence in them and yet a gesture, for example of pointing or stopping, when it is tired and the fingers relax, becomes one of blessing and so it is that the poet Iana Boukova writes of this book: "Gesture introduces silence, replacing words and their definitions. There are whole passages full of the underwater silence of one gesture." It is rare to have a book of Bulgarian literature published in English and the reader will find here many elements of Bulgarian culture and the Orthodox tradition.
Tsvetanka Elenkova Crookedness
Translated from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne. English language only.
Published 2019. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616868 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The world according to Tsvetanka Elenkova is both lucid and hieratic. In it, a lover’s eye is ‘a disc on a chain /with the god of the sun /the window casts on the wall’; but love itself is an ‘Altar’ on which the lovers are ‘lying crosswise’. The poet’s own narrative eye keeps shifting viewpoint – and perspective – not for the sake of it but to create depth and meaning: ‘The other side of perspective /is dimension’. It’s all expressed with economy and the utmost clarity: yet that clarity is deceptive. These poems, too, depend on your point of view: ‘Reflection is capture’ indeed, and reflection may be not only the untroubled mirror image, but the pause and re-handling of meditation.
Another way to say all this is that Elenkova is a religious mystic; […] She lives in the world of cars, mobile phones and city parks, and has an imagination stuffed with cultural riches, […b]ut she also lives in a poetic world … of religious mystery, mortality, love and desire. This mystical verse dives repeatedly into the given, and discovers there a world of symbol and – perhaps above all – movement. It is not Gerard Manley Hopkins’s search for ‘inscape’, but instead an apprehension that from moment to moment forms itself into symbolic codes – and then releases those codes into the material, sensual world.
—Fiona Sampson
Tsvetanka Elenkova Magnification Forty
Translated from Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne
Published October 2023. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20. English only.
ISBN 9781848619005 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here.]
"These miraculous poems of everyday matter magnified by forty reveal our world in all its pristine glory – reminiscent of Pablo Neruda’s household odes, but stranger. Her sketches of waterfalls are extraordinary, as if we are witnessing the birth of water and every inch hallucinatory. Her magnifying eye probes the roots of matter and spirit, where they intertwine and dance with light. Tsvetanka Elenkova has a mystic’s eye, an inventive vision honed with surgical precision." —Pascale Petit
"In Magnification Forty, Tsvetanka Elenkova turns her piercing poetic intelligence upon the small things of the world. She lifts them up to us in all their revelatory and spiritual power. Elenkova is a visionary, who makes quietness speak and who reminds us that the miracle of embodiment is realised not only in the exceptional but in what’s humble and quotidian. This deeply mindful book is a call for us to pay attention to what we experience. It’s also a masterclass in the lucid and economical poetics that have made Elenkova into a leading European poet." —Fiona Sampson
Tsvetanka Elenkova (ed.) & Jonathan Dunne (trans.) At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria
Published 2012. Paperback, 130pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20. English only.
ISBN 9781848612617 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria is an anthology of seventeen Bulgarian poets writing and publishing from the middle of the twentieth century to today. Rather than being a collection of emblematic poems, it is a thematic book which reflects the searching and original, distinctive styles of contemporary Bulgarian poetry, itself reminiscent of the city and landscape.
Helena Eriksson strata
Translated from Swedish by Jan Teeland and Wendy Klein. English only.
Published 2014. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612747 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The poetry of Helena Eriksson can be positioned within the Swedish literary avant-garde associated with the poetry magazine and publishing house, OEI. It is her strong, unique voice, however, which qualifies her for consideration as one of the most interesting and influential Swedish poets of her generation.
In her alluring, almost filmic poems, she introduces themes of violence and treachery, through the use of doppelgängers and disguises. She is influenced here by a longer tradition represented by writers such as Genet, Bataille and Duras, where literature offers a site for the exploration of desire, rupture and identities in revolt. Motifs that in Eriksson are often articulated as sensuous and tactile, may also be stifled or smothered in layers of cloth, ruffles and ruffs, pearl necklaces, corsets, dresses and bows. As noted in one of the poems in strata, with its many references to Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I and their portraits: “Everything is costume”. That is, reality is a constant act of playing out desires and identities, and poetry is a mode of framing these just as precisely, but differently. —Hanna Nordenhök, poet and critic.
Kjell Espmark A Cloud of Witnesses
Translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Published 2022. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
Published 2022. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
Kjell Espmark (b.1930) has been a member of The Swedish Academy since 1981, serving as Chairman of The Nobel Committee from 1988 to 2004. He has published twenty volumes of poetry, ten novels, and over a dozen volumes of literary criticism. Of the Spanish version of his latest book of poetry, Martín Lopez-Vega wrote in El Mundo: “The Creation
confirms that we are faced with one of the most important poets of our time.”
Many of Espmark´s poems are dramatic monologues in which the dead, some famous, some anonymous, speak to us, hoping for our attention. Another consistent feature of his poetry, and one which we can see extending over six decades, is the coherence we find within each volume, echoes and cross-references linking poems not only within a single collection but from book to book.
Kjell Espmark Bela Bartók Against the Third Reich
Translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton. English only.
Published 1985. A5 Paperback, 77pp, £8.95.
Published jointly with Oasis Books, London, and Norstedts, Stockholm.
ISBN 9780903375702
The first publication in English by one of Sweden's leading poets. The selection was made by the author and the translator from a trilogy of volumes published in Swedish in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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from Small Press Distribution
Maria Ferenčuhová Tidal Events — Selected Poems
Translated from Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith. English only.
Published 2018. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
Mária Ferenčuhová has emerged as one of the most promising and original European poets of the twenty-first century and is a rising star at international festivals. Beginning as one of the cool, post-modernist Slovak "aNesthetic" and "Text" poets using a matter-of-fact language with precise visual perceptions, her work has expanded its range of concerns from urban life to a wider perception of the individual in a world damaged by history and threatened by environmental destruction. At the heart of her work is a profound belief in a necessary relationship between human beings and the earth.
Brandel France de Bravo (ed.) Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices
Translated from Spanish and Zapotec by various hands. Bilingual edition.
Published 2010. Paperback, 248pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848610576 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Mexico is one of the major centres of Hispanic poetry—something which is perhaps more visible from the USA than from Britain, but nonetheless something that needs to be realised by anyone who cares about contemporary poetry in Spanish, or indeed, contemporary poetry of any kind. This volume includes work by the following poets: Luis Miguel Aguilar, María Baranda, Efraín Bartolomé, Marco Antonio Campos, Hector Carreto, Elsa Cross, Jennifer Clement, Antonio Deltoro, Gloria Gervitz, Francisco Hernández, Elva Macías, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, Samuel Noyola, José Luis Rivas, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Pedro Serrano, Natalia Toledo, Manuel Ulacia, Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez and Verónica Volkow.
Tony Frazer (ed) Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age, in contemporary English translations
Shearsman Classics Series No.3. Bilingual edition.
Published 2008. Paperback, 139pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700691 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Some of the greatest writers of 16th and 17th century Spain are represented here, in translations from 16th and 17th century England. This was an era when translation was important for the dissemination of new styles and forms, and it gives a fascinating view of two great literatures interacting – for both were at their peak: the Spanish Golden Age stretches from roughly 1540 to 1660, and the first great era of English poetry and drama overlaps this almost exactly. Poems by Montemayor, Boscán, Garcilaso, Góngora, Quevedo, Cervantes, Argensola and Mendoza; translations by Sidney, Ayres, Fanshawe, Drummond, Stanley, Yong and Shelton.
Luisa Futoransky Nettles
Translated from Spanish by Philippa Page. Bilingual edition.
Published 2016. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614642 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Luisa Futoransky is a poet of lived experience above all, though not hers alone; other voices inhabit the work, whether of friends, lovers, fellow travellers (people she met or figures from history and literature). Like her fiction, the poetry employs a direct language rooted in anecdote and reflection, while sometimes delighting in playful experimentalism. Hers are mosaic narratives, made of pieces, fragments.
Something else to notice in Nettles
is her flair for the theatrical, especially acute when she writes in shorter forms. Surely her studies of opera helped to hone her instinct for the dramatic gesture. But to think that we start in Rome with this book only to end up in Ohio. That is some sense of humour.
Forrest Gander (ed./trans.) Panic Cure — Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century
Published 2013. Paperback, 210pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.
Bilingual edition.
ISBN 9781848612952 [Download a sample PDF from this book here
(translations only).]
The poets featured in this volume are Antonio Gamoneda, Olvido García Valdés, Miguel Casado, Marcos Canteli, Sandra Santana, Benito del Pliego, Julia Piera, Ana Gorría, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Esther Ramón.
"This anthology charts some of my own enthusiasms; it isn't a comprehensive list. It seems more significant to represent ten substantial writers with a generous selection of poems than thirty or forty writers with one or two poems apiece. The ten poets collected here represent one of many possible configurations of an exploratory surge that signals a moment of change in Spain's literature." (Forrest Gander)
Lorand Gaspar Four Poems
Translated from French by Peter Riley.
Published 1993. A5 centre-stapled, 43pp. Published jointly with Oasis Books, London.
ISBN 9780907562184. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562184. Out of print.
Translations of four long poems by a respected contemporary French poet.
Gloria Gervitz Migrations
Translated from Spanish by Mark Schafer. Bilingual edition.
Published 2004. Paperback, 9.25 x 7.5ins. 400pp. £19.95. OUT OF PRINT.
ISBN 9780907562498.
New edition now available from NYRB Press, New York.
Migrations
is a long poem, the final version of which runs to seven books. The first six were published in Mexico City in a single volume in 2002 by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. This volume presents the complete original text of Migraciones,
with recent revisions, plus the seventh book, hitherto only available in a limited-edition chapbook, together with Mark Schafer's inspired translation of the entire text.
Anna Glazova Twice under the Sun
Translated from Russian by Anna Khasin. English only.
Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700929 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Twice under the Sun
presents a cross-section of Anna Glazova's work from the past seven years, spectacularly translated—with the author's assistance—by Anna Khasin. The book is Ms Glazova's first book-length publication in English.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust — A Tragedy
Shearsman Classics No. 14. Translated from German by Mike Smith. English only.
Published 2012. Paperback, 206pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848612143 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A new translation of one of the greatest monuments of German literature. This is the famous first part (Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil), and does not include the extraordinary (and virtually unstageable) Part 2, completed many years later. First published in 1808, and then in a revised edition in 1829, the story — a variant of the old Faustus legend—concerns the scientist (or perhaps, better, natural philosopher), Dr Heinrich Faust, whose scientific quests, and their lack of success, lead him into a state of great frustration. Parallel to this, Mephistopheles (the Devil) lays a wager with God that he can subvert God's favoured human (for this is Faust).… (read more on the book page)
Hagit Grossman Trembling in the City
Translated from Hebrew by Benjamin Balint. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614772 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Hagit Grossman's poetry hovers through the city streets like a floating camera, observing the outcasts and scanning them in wavelengths that are usually beyond the range of our perception. But in addition to mapping the actual city streets, this book also registers the city's interior spaces.
The poems in the book shake us and cast us, with honesty and courage, toward the intimacies from which we prefer to avert our eyes." —Amir Becker
Harry Guest Otherlands —
Translations of Jean Cassou, Rainer Maria Rilke and other poets
Published 2017. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18. English only.
ISBN 9781848614796 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Otherlands
brings together a compendium of Harry Guest's translations from French, German, Italian and Japanese, although the largest representations are those of Cassou (33 sonnets composed in secret) and Rilke (several pieces, including The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke von Langenau), and runs from poets of the 16th century to our contemporaries.
Gëzim Hajdari Stigmata
Translated by Cristina Viti. Bilingual Italian/English edition.
Published 2016. Paperback, 140pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614413 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Runner-Up, John Florio Prize for translations from Italian, awarded by The Society of Authors.
Runner-Up, John Florio Prize for translations from Italian, awarded by The Society of Authors.
Gëzim Hajdari (b. 1957) was born in Lushnja, Albania, but has lived in Frosinone, Italy, since 1992, initially in the ruins of an abandoned building, but now in an apartment that he was awarded by the town council after he was awarded the prestigious Montale Prize. He writes in both Albanian and Italian, but is perhaps more recog-nised in his adopted country than in his native land. Stigmate / Vragë
appeared in a bilingual edition in 2002 and here receives its first complete English translation. “My identity is Gëzim, my body is my fatherland,” says the author.
Gëzim Hajdari Bitter Grass
Translated from Italian by Ian Seed. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617032 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Bitter Grass
was written in 1976 while I was in my last year of high school in the city of Lushnje in Albania. It was refused by N. Frashëri, the government publication house in Tirana. According to the censor, ‘the texts in this collection do not deal with the theme of our socialist village; the hero of the poems is a solitary person who flees from his contemporaries, from the Youth Association, from reality; moreover, the transformations that socialism has brought to the countryside under the guidance of the Party are entirely absent…’ At that time, the collection had the title The Forest Diary. I translated the texts from Albanian into Italian in 1999. Two years later, in 2001, the work was published for the first time in Italy. This new publication has been expanded and includes new texts in respect to the first edition.
Offering these poems to readers, it’s as if I were going back many years to the icy and inhospitable winter of the Albanian dictatorship where I began my journey as a poet."
—Gëzim Hadari
Kathleen M Hedeen & Zoë Skoulding (eds.)
Poetry's Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations
Published November 2022. Paperback, 202pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95. Not for sale in North America.
ISBN 9781848618510 [Download a PDF of the Introduction to this book here.]
Available in North America from Eulalia Books.
Available in North America from Eulalia Books.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, translating Najwan DarwishDon Mee Choi, translating Kim HyesoonSasha Dugdale, translating Maria StepanovaDaniel Eltringham, translating Ana María RodasForrest Gander, translating Coral BrachoJohannes Göransson, translating Kristina OlssonKatherine M. Hedeen, translating Víctor Rodríguez NúñezMeena Kandasamy, translating ThiruvalluvarGhazal Mosadeq, translating Akhavan SalesErín Moure, translating Chus PatoZoë Skoulding, translating Fred ForteStephen Watts, translating Ziba Karbassi
W.N. Herbert & Yang Lian (eds.) The Third Shore
Chinese and English-language poets in mutual translation. Bilingual.
Published 2013. Paperback, 232pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848613096 [Download a PDF of the introduction to this book here.]
Walter Benjamin called translation "The Third Language", because a translation is neither the same as the original, nor the same as the normal foreign-language of other texts, for it is something unique, something set apart from either, just as bronze forged from copper and tin overcomes the brittleness of copper and the softness of tin to become both hard and pliable, as if it has become a new element. In this volume, Chinese poets and English-language poets come together to translate each other's work.
Fernando de Herrera: Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics Series. No. 18.
Translated from Spanish by Luis Ingelmo & Michael Smith. Bilingual edition.
Published 2014. Paperback, 146pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
SBN 9781848613348 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Perhaps the greatest of Spain's Renaissance poets, Fernando de Herrera (1534-97), a native of Seville, was the writer who took on board the experiments with Italian forms carried out by his predecessors Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega (whose work he edited and annotated), and made of them a native style. As it was with many other poets elsewhere — such as Sir Thomas Wyatt in England — the example of Petrarch, both directly, and as mediated by Garcilaso, was crucial in the development of Herrera's elegant vernacular verse. With Garcilaso, Boscán and Herrera, Spanish poetry takes wing. The generation that followed Herrera was to be the greatest literary flowering in Spanish history.
Emmanuel Hocquard Elegies, and other poems
Translated from French by John A. Scott. English only.
Published 1989. A5 Paperback, 48pp. Out of print.
ISBN 9780907562153
The only collection of Hocquard's (1940–2019) work available in the UK, this book includes the first five Elegies
(originally published by P.O.L., Paris, 1979 & 1987) in translations by the renowned Australian poet-novelist, John A. Scott. The complete Elegies
(1-7) were subsequently published by Picador Australia in 1990 in Scott's collected Translations. Elegies 6 and 7 were later published in Shearsman
magazine in slightly revised versions. Alas, when this edition went out of print, we were unable to obtain permission to reissue it in an expanded edition. For those who have the French there's a good Gallimard paperback of the seven elegies.
Brian Holton Staunin Ma Lane
Translated from Chinese, into Scots and English. Trilingual.
Published 2016. Paperback, 146pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614666 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Staunin Ma Lane
isn’t intended to be a comprehensive tour of classical [Chinese] poetry, though it does contain specimens of many of the major genres and styles, and it may serve as a first primer. Note that the poetry is in the Scots: the English versions are there to help the non-Scots speaker. It has been my aim to make poems in Scots: if you expect to find dictionary definitions of Chinese words in my translations, you will be disappointed. That sort of drably mechanical ‘accuracy’ does not make poetry, and a poem that doesn’t move the reader is like a joke that isn’t funny. In the translation of poetry, there are many, many more ways of being wrong than of being right, and I do not claim that my versions are in any way de finitive or better than anyone else’s: I do, however, want to say to the reader, “Deek whit the Mither Tongue can dae: gin it can dae this, whit’ll it no can dae?” (Look what our mother tongue can do: if it can do this, what will it not do?), and I would urge readers inclined toward translation to do it for themselves, whatever their mother tongue might be.” —Brian Holton
Peter Huchel These Numbered Days
WINNER OF THE SCHLEGEL-TIECK PRIZE FOR GERMAN TRANSLATION,
FROM THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS.
Translated from German by Martyn Crucefix. Bilingual edition.
FROM THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS.
Translated from German by Martyn Crucefix. Bilingual edition.
Published 2019. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616608 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.].
“With Brecht, Benn, Bobrowski and Celan, Peter Huchel is one of a handful of essential post-war poets in the German language. A precise observer of natural pheno-mena, Huchel is above all a realist whose metaphors take us deep into the social and historical landscape, into zones of devastation and despair, the zero-hour of isolation. His world is devoid of illusion or sentimentality; there is no redemption, at most an exactitude that is itself a confirmation of what is human and real. Lifted out of the schismatic currents of the Cold War era by Martyn Crucefix’s supple and arrestingly sensual translations, Huchel surprises us as a fresh and startling voice for our own numbered days.” —Iain Galbraith
Norbert Hummelt Berlin Fresco — Selected Poems
Translated from German by Catherine Hales. English only.
Published 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610965 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Berlin Fresco
is the first volume in English by the German poet, translator, editor, and publisher, Norbert Hummelt. Born in the Rhineland in 1962, he has been a freelance writer since 1991, and editor of the literary-critical journal Text+Kritik. He has taught at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. He has translated the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wordsworth and Inger Christensen, as well as Eliot's Four Quartets
and The Waste Land.
Max Jacob Advice to a Young Poet
Translated from French by John Adlard, with a Preface by Edmond Jabès. 2nd edition.
Published 2023. Paperback, 86p, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
Published 2023. Paperback, 86p, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618626 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Advice to a Young Poet
is the English translation, first published on the centenary of the author’s birth in 1967, of Max Jacob’s posthumous Conseils à un jeune poète. This was Jacob’s last major statement on poetry, the culmination of a lifetime’s reflection on, and practice of, the art. This book makes his great personal as well as literary influence on many poets and writers easier to understand. The translator, John Adlard, supplies an introduction which is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Jacob. The book is completed by a deeply personal preface from the pen of Edmond Jabès, and a historically important afterword by the “young poet” himself, Jacques Evrard, the first time he had expressed himself on the subject.
Sasja Janssen Putting On My Species
Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback,72pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617056 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Putting On My Species
is about identity and selfhood, the desire for the very beginning, the sardonic pleasure of making and destroying in order to start over again, the love of poetry. How should I live? Sasja Janssen wonders. Who am I? Am I my memories? In a sober but moving style, Sasja Janssen gnaws away at her species.
Kent Johnson & Roberto Echavarren (eds.) Hotel Lautréamont: Contemporary Poetry from Uruguay
Translated from Spanish by various hands. Bilingual edition.
Published 2011. Paperback, 218pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848611894
Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror
under the name Comte de Lautréamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery's book of the same title, this is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years, and features the work of Roberto Appratto, Nancy Bacelo, Amanda Berenguer, Selva Casal, Marosa Di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Gustavo Espinosa, Silvia Guerra, Circe Maia, Eduardo Milán and Idea Vilariño.
Trevor Joyce Courts of Air and Earth
Translated from the Irish. Text in English only.
Published 2008. Paperback 8.5 x 5.5ins, 96pp, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9780907562955 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This volume extracts the author's remarkable translation of the epic 'Sweeny Peregrine' from the above volume and offers it together with a large group of other versions from the Old and Middle Irish, thus offering Anglophone readers a glimpse of some very unusual verse that rarely sees the light of day outside academic volumes, while also transposing it into a form that will seem familiar to readers of Joyce's own work.
Ferenc Juhász Selected Poems
Translated from Hungarian by David Wevill
Published 2022. Paperback, 74pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / US$18.
Published 2022. Paperback, 74pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / US$18.
ISBN 9781848618343 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Not for sale in Canada.
Not for sale in Canada.
Completing the reissue of all of David Wevill's literary works, this volume brings back into print his versions of the great post-war Hungarian poet, Ferenc Juhász (1928–2015), originally published by Penguin in their seminal Modern European Poets series. A man of humble origins, Juhász's work moved away from the strictures of socialist realism and began to use Hungarian historical themes, and, crucially, folk-myths, in his work. This culminated in the long poem, 'The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamours at the Gate of Secrets', which W.H. Auden described as the finest long poem ever written — although one should note that Auden had no knowledge of Hungarian. The myth at the back of this poem has common origins with the poems used in Bartók's wonderful Cantata Profana. As with many such myths, the central conceit seems to reach back into a pre-Christian past, where humans, animals and the whole natural world are of one piece.
Vasily Kandinsky Sounds
Translated from German by Tony Frazer. English edition, with original text in an appendix.
Contains 12 colour woodcuts and 44 black-and-white woodcuts by Kandinsky.
Published 2018. Paperback, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £16.95 / $30
Published 2018. Hardcover, 142pp, 8 x 8ins, £35 / $49.95
ISBN 9781848616066 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The hardcover edition has higher-quality images.
Klänge
(Sounds) was Kandinsky’s only poetry publication—a collection of prose poems, accompanied by 56 of his own inimitable woodcuts, 12 of them in colour. It appeared in late 1912, or early 1913 (the exact date is uncertain) from the Munich publishing house, Piper, and thus came at a crucial time in Kandinsky’s artistic life: just after he had made the great breakthrough into abstraction, and likewise just after the publication of his seminal text, Über das Geistige in der Kunst
(On the Spiritual in Art). These were not the only poems that he wrote—others are preserved in the artist’s papers—but these are the ones he chose to publish, and in a lavish edition.
Abdulkareem Kasid Sarabad
Translated from Arabic by the author & Sara Halub, with John Welch. English only,
Published 2015. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614420 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Well-known in the Arab world as a poet, essayist and translator Abdulkareem Kasid, born in Basra in 1946, escaped from Iraq in 1978 and went to live in Aden. He lived and worked in Damascus for ten years before settling in London with his wife and two children. In recent years he has returned to Iraq from time to time as well as travelling widely in North Africa and the Middle East. His translations from French into Arabic include poetry by Rimbaud, Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, and Anabase by Saint-John Perse. In 2006 he worked on A Soldier’s Tale, Stravinsky’s opera transposed to an Iraqi setting and performed at the Old Vic Theatre in 2006. Translations of his work have appeared in a variety of print and online journals in the UK.
Thomas Kling zerodrifter: Selected Poems 1983–2005
Translated from German by Andrew Duncan. Bilingual Edition.
Published 2019. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24
ISBN 9781848616561 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Thomas Kling (1957-2005) was born in Bingen am Rhein, near Frankfurt, grew up in Hilden, and went to school in Düsseldorf. He later lived in Vienna, Finland and Cologne, and finally settled down as a freelance writer near Neuss, living in a house on a decommissioned NATO missile station in Hombroich. As well as numerous collections of poems he also published translations of Catullus and was editor of the anthology Sprachspeicher. 200 Gedichte auf deutsch vom achten bis zum zwanzigsten Jahrhundert
(Language Storage. 200 Poems in German from the 8th to the 20th Century, 2001). Thomas Kling died on 1 April 2005 at the age of 47, a victim of lung cancer, by then recognised as one of the most important German-language poets of his time. He had come to wide recognition in the 1980s, gaining renown for performances of his work (which he referred to as “speech-installations”, rather than as readings) and was one of the main forces behind the renovation of contemporary German poetry that occurred at that time, for which he reached back to the expressionist era and also to the post-war Viennese avant-garde, which had previously gained little traction in Germany. He was awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Prize, the Peter Huchel Prize, and the Ernst Jandl Prize. His Collected Poems (Gesammelte Gedichte 1981–2005) was published in 2006. This is the first volume of his work to be published in English.
Alfred Kolleritsch Selected Poems
Translated from German by Iain Galbraith. English only.
Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700301
The first English-language survey of Austrian poet Alfred Kolleritsch's work. Kolleritsch is the doyen of the Graz literary scene, and editor of the indispensable magazine manuskripte, for decades one of the major German-language literary/poetic journals.
Gertrud Kolmar Worlds
Translated from German by philip kuhn & ruth von zimmermann. Bilingual edition.
With an introductory essay by philip kuhn and a foreword by Regina Nörtemann.
Published 2012. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848611986 [Download a sample PDF from this book here
(English texts only).]
Welten
(Worlds) is a cycle of poems written in the second half of 1937 by Gertrud Kolmar, who was to perish six years later in Auschwitz. The manuscript was passed in 1947 by her brother-in-law to Peter Suhrkamp, publisher at Suhrkamp Verlag—now Germany's premier literary press—and was one of the first books to appear from Suhrkamp after the war.
José Kozer Anima
Translated from Spanish by Peter Boyle. Bilingual edition.
Published 2011. Paperback, 268pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.
ISBN 9781848611467 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A sixty-year-old man writes a poem and entitles it 'Anima'. Days later he writes another poem with a tone similar to the first, entitles it 'Anima', then realises he has just begun a series which must all bear the same title.
Furthermore, the man decides that in the future and till the day of his death he is going to continue writing poems that, since they have this tone, will bear the title 'Anima'. At the end of a year, having written some 150 poems, he extracts from the accumulated mass 60 poems called 'Anima'. (José Kozer)
José Kozer Tokonoma (Bilingual edition)
Translated from Spanish by Peter Boyle. Bilingual.
Published 2014. Paperback, 242pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848613744 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A tokonoma is an alcove in a traditional Japanese house, which serves to display a scroll, ikebana or a special painting or print. It is also a kind of code-word in neo-baroque Hispanic writing, having been much used by the movement’s founder and inspiration, Cuban poet José Lezama Lima. Here the tokonoma is part of José Kozer’s linguistic armoury: another Cuban poet, but this time one in exile in the USA and, by common consent, the doyen of the current Hispanic neo-baroque. Here Kozer engages with Japanese and Chinese poetry, learning, myth and much more besides. This is Kozer’s second collection with Shearsman, following Anima
(2011)
José Kozer Tokonoma (English-only edition)
Translated from Spanish by Peter Boyle. English-only.
Published 2014. Paperback, 144pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95.
ISBN 9781848613850 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
This is the same book as the one shown above, but without the Spanish texts, and at a slightly more attractive price for those not requiring the original versions.
Pura López-Colomé Aurora
Translated from Spanish by Jason Stumpf. English only.
Published 2007. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700387 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Aurora
was first published in Mexico City in 1994 by Ediciones Equilibrista, and was the author's third full-length collection. Her entire output has since been collected in Mexico in a single volume Música inaudita.
Pura López Colomé Speaking in Song (Hearing and Forgetting)
Translated from Spanish by Dan Bellm. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 154pp, 9x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615540 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for the Northern California Book Awards for Translation.
Among the most ambitious and varied work of Pura López Colomé’s distinguished career, Speaking in Song
displays the poet’s extraordinary range and musicality, conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world—and one’s story, history, and place in it—in the context of hearing and memory, and in the form of song. Many of the poems have been set to music by composers from Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Ramón López Velarde The Soft Land
Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Clement. Bilingual edition.
With paintings by Gustavo Monroy & an essay by Luis Miguel Aguilar. FULL COLOUR EDITION.
Published 2017. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
‘La suave patria’ is often regarded as the Mexican national poem, an extraordinary tour-de-force that would change forever the way that poetry would develop in Mexico. It was one of the last works by Ramón López Velarde, who died of pneumonia at the age of only 33 in 1921, and is the work for which he is most remembered today. After his death, his reputation took some time to grow, but his later espousal by major figures such Xavier Villaurrutia and Octavio Paz has ensured that he will remain central to the story of Mexican 20th century literature.
Antonio Machado Solitudes and Other Early Poems
Shearsman Classics Vol. 20.
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo.
Published 2015. Paperback, 166pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613911 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Antonio Machado is, without a doubt, the father of modern Spanish lyric poetry: a bridge that stretches between Bécquer, Rubén Darío and the generation of Jiménez, Lorca, Alberti, Guillén and Aleixandre. An early visit to Paris and an engagement with Symbolism, and its Spanish equivalent, modernism, in the shape of Rubén Darío, was to determine his course as a poet. Machado, however, unlike many of the French symbolists and perhaps because he was Spanish, never turned his back on common reality. Rather, reality and natural images were as sacred to him as mysterious cyphers, flickering shadows at the mouth of the Cave. He was a deeply humanitarian poet; he believed in human emotions and intuitions, and he was always opposed to the baroque in Spanish poetry because he saw it as cerebral or conceptual and therefore an inadequate means of receiving signi-ficance from the temporal flux in which human beings live.
Mai Cheng Selected Poems
Translated from Chinese by Denis Mair. Bilingual edition.
Published 2008. Paperback, 140pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700882 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A bilingual collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is his first collection to be made available in translation.
Stéphane Mallarmé Sonnets
Translated from French by David Scott. Bilingual edition.
Published 2008. Paperback, 128pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700424 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A fully bilingual edition of Mallarmé's Sonnets, with introduction and notes designed for the undergraduate. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarmé's engagement with this particular form.
Osip Mandelstam Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems
Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon. English only.
Published 2018. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616011 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
An extensive sampling of the whole of Mandelstam’s career from his first collection up to the late poems that were memorised by his wife, when it was too dangerous to have them written down. One of the great poets of the first half of the 20th century, Mandelstam is one of the figures who needs to be translated and re-translated, being too important to be taken for granted.
Osip Mandelstam The Voronezh Workbooks
Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon
Published 2022. Paperback, 178pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
Published 2022. Paperback, 178pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848618350 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Osip Mandelstam spent three years in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, after someone in his circle of acquaintances had informed the Soviet authorities of his "Stalin Epigram" in 1934. The ninety-odd poems he wrote there are the pinnacle of his poetic achievement, bearing witness to Mandelstam's consistent independence of mind and concern for the freedom of thought. More covertly and controversially, however, they also bear the marks of Mandelstam's attempts to somehow reinstate himself back into Soviet society. In addition to all the poems that Russian editors have suggested constitute the sequence Mandelstam would have wished to see into print, this edition includes the main variants and exclusions preserved in manuscripts and the memory of Mandelstam's wife and executor, Nadezdha Mandelstam.
Osip Mandelstam Occasional and Joke Poems
Translated from Russian by Alistair Noon
Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
Published 2022. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618367 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Parallel to his more famous poems about the buildings of St. Petersburg, the shores of the Black Sea, and the streets of Voronezh, Mandelstam wrote many brief, spontaneous poems about his friends, enemies and everyday occurrences over his entire writing life. Though his poetic, political and personal trajectory was to be a lonely one, he in fact had a convivial and gregarious personality, of which these poems are a product. This volume collects them in English for the first time, with an introduction and notes for context. It provides a fresh perspective on this poet whose sense of the past, the present and the future seems second to none.
Jorge Manrique Stanzas on the Death of His Father
Translated by Patrick McGuinness. Introduced by Geraldine Hazbun. Shearsman Classics series.
Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848617728 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Coplas a la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique (c.1440–79) is one of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. Written shortly before the poet’s death, it is a dignified elegy that speaks not just of a personal loss, that of the poet’s father Rodrigo Manrique (d.1476), but of the evanescence of all things. Its popularity is aided by memorable lines, not least the two opening metaphors: man’s life is a river meandering unto the sea of death, and this world is the road to the next, the lasting dwelling place. The poem replicates these reflections in its wending form. Its forty stanzas each comprise four tercets; each tercet is made up of two longer octosyllabic verses combined with one four-syllable half-line known as pie quebrado. These regular broken lines, like beats of a heart, invest the poem with a resonant quality befitting the injunction at the opening of the poem to awaken one’s slumbering soul to the passage of time.
Martial Mea Roma — A Meditative Sampling of M. Valerius Martialis
Translated from Latin by Art Beck. Bilingual edition.
Published 2018. Paperback, 132pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616189 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This ‘sampling’ covers some of the usual suspects, epigrams, verse tags, scurrilous and otherwise, but it also includes a number of poems from the Liber Spectaculorum, the Book of Spectacles, devoted to poems on the Games at the Colosseum and, often, in praise of Caesar. Martial’s themes can make the modern reader very uncomfortable, as well as make them laugh, even 2,000 years after his death.
Mario Martín Gijón Sur(rendering)
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley. Bilingual volume.
Published 2020. Paperback, 128pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617049 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Mario Martín Gijón’s (Sur)rendering
is a sequence of short passionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness.
Eduardo Moga explains his method: ‘The poetry of Mario Martín Gijón is characterised by a morphological promiscuity which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand. They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous meanings.”
Víctor Manuel Mendiola Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Ruth Fainlight, Jennifer Clement and others. English only.
Published 2008. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700899 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
This is the first collection in the UK for Mexican poet Victor Manuel Mendiola, although his work has been appearing in small-press editions, in others' collections and in journals for some time. His collected poems Tan oro y ogro (1987–2002) (UNAM, Mexico City) won New York's Premio Latino de Literatura (Latino Literature Prize) in 2005. This Selected
shows the full range of his work, but begins with his astonishing erotic long poem 'Tu Mano Mi Boca' (Your Hand, My Mouth), which was so well received in Ruth Fainlight's translation when it was included in her latest collection of poems.
George Messo (ed.) Ikinci Yeni — The Turkish Avant-Garde
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. English only.
Published 2009. Paperback, 168pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20.00
ISBN 9781848610668 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In the mid-1950s a small but energetic group of young Turkish poets exploded into creative life. Their vivid, cosmopolitan experimentalism sent shock waves through the literary establishment. They became known as the Ikinci Yeni (The Second New). Inspired by surrealism and the contemporary European avant-garde, their influence was widespread and lasting — Turkish poetry would never be the same again.
In this unique anthology George Messo introduces broad selections from five of the leading Ikinci Yeni poets: Ece Ayhan, Ilhan Berk, Edip Cansever, Cemal Süreya and Turgut Uyar.
Eduardo Milán Selected Poems
Edited by Antonio Ochoa. Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon
and Patrick Madden & Steven Stewart. English only.
Published 2012. Paperback, 148pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20.
ISBN 9781848612006 [Download a sample PDF from this book here
(English texts only).]
This is the first significant publication of Milán's poems in English — here offered in a biiingual edition that covers all periods of his work. A native of Uruguay, Milán has lived in exile in Mexico for over 30 years. His work also featured in Shearsman's Uruguayan anthology Hotel Lautréamont
(2011).
Eduardo Milán Selected Essays
Edited by Antonio Ochoa. Translated from Spanish by Leslie Harkema, Ruth Hemus,
Antonio Ochoa & David Nielsen. Introduced by William Rowe. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614741 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A companion volume to our 2013 edition of Milán’s Selected Poems, also edited by Antonio Ochoa. Uruguayan by birth, Eduardo Milán has long been resident in Mexico, and his essays cover the whole gamut of modern Latin American poetry.
Agi Mishol Less Like a Dove
Translated from Hebrew by Joanna Chen. English only.
Published 2016. Paperback, 94pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614765 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Agi Mishol was awarded the prestigious Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award in 2019.
"Agi Mishol, one of the most popular poets of Israel, captures the imagination and the heart of Israeli readers by observing common daily realities through a contemplative, sometimes meditative, perspective, negotiating the space between the mundane and the spiritual with a lively sense of humor. Having overcome such dissociations of sensibility, Mishol’s poems are flushed with a flow of vitality and freshness. With no undue emphasis, eschewing declarative pronouncements, the poet points to the important truths looming behind the veil of the trivial. Avoiding opacity and heaviness of any kind her carefully chosen words, semantically loaded to the brim, also throb with reined-in musicality and elan. The current selection of Mishol’s poems represents the latest phase in the development of the poet’s work in full ripeness." —Prof. Dan Miron, Columbia University
Eduardo Moga Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 160pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848615311 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
We have become used to a life of routine and uniformity: at work, in our relationships with others and with ourselves when we seek to understand what surrounds and subjugates us. Messages flood in and, instead of criticising reality, they reinforce the status quo and encourage us to accept it and maintain it. To counterbalance the hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga’s, which don’t mourn a presumed lost golden age, or bewail their disillusionment. That phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that the gods do not love us, but torment us, and then put all his efforts into unlearning it all. Moga’s poetry does not preach, however, or burden us with rules or ideas to bring us to an imaginary better world, here or in the afterlife.
Eduardo Moga My Father
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley. Bilingual edition.
Published 2021. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617575 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Poetry Book Society Translation Choice
Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco dictatorship when it was ‘as if everybody’s feet smelt’. He is seen with a forensic clarity through now a child’s, now an adult’s eyes and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits, angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga’s great achievement, he is a real living person.
Eduardo Moga (ed.) Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark
Spanish Poets in London 1811-2018: An Anthology
Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley
Published 2019. Paperback, 280pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848616806 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.] Bilingual Edition.
I bring together here a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier.
The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront. (Eduardo Moga)
Gérard de Nerval Les Chimères
Shearsman Classics series, No. 24.
Translated from French by Will Stone. Bilingual edition.
Introductions by Anne Beresford & Michael Hamburger and with notes by Norma Rinsler.
Published 2017. Paperback, 64pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614109 [Download a sample PDF from this book.]
Nerval is one of the most important writers of the French Romantic movement. His great sonnet cycle, Les Chimères, in its marvellous combination of spell, quest and dream, continues to fascinate writers, readers, and translators. Will Stone’s spirited English versions are accompanied by an essay, as well as by an introduction – written in 1949 – by the late Michael Hamburger, as well as commentary by Norma Rinsler, the doyenne of English Nervaliens.
Paschalis Nikolaou (ed.) 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy
Translated from Greek by Richard Berengarten & Paschalis Nikolaou. Bilingual.
Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95. ISBN 9781848614499
[Download 'A Note on Translating 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy' here and 'Εκ του Ελληνικού' / 'From the Greek' here .]
Throughout his adult life, C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) rarely journeyed outside his native Alexandria, though he spent some of his childhood years in Liverpool and London. In the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the reach of his poetry has been immense. It has been witnessed and addressed through a global wealth of versions, imitations and rewritings: those poems written ‘in the manner of Cavafy’, variously channelling his themes and style. Here, for the first time in English, is a selection of such work by poets writing in Cavafy’s own language, Greek. Together they embed the intimacy of shared culture, skilfully mirroring passions and preoccupations. This bilingual presentation includes voices familiar to English readers, such as those of George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos, alongside lesser known names – all of them, engaged in layered dialogues with Cavafy. The result is a lasting image of literary influence and reception, and ultimately, of poetry translated by poetry.
Aníbal Núñez Selected Poems
Translated from Spanish by Michael Smith & Luis Ingelmo. Bilingual edition.
Published 2013. Paperback, 303pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23.
ISBN 9781848612594 [Download a sample PDF from this book here (Translations only).]
Aníbal Núñez (1944-1987) has been described as the best Spanish poet of his generation, sometimes called the generation of ’68. His recognition has been a long time coming, no doubt due to the fact that he stood outside the accepted currents of his time. Poet, painter, essayist and translator, he died young, but left behind a very large body of work which has only begun to receive its due in recent years, as the critical orthodoxy in Spain has begun to accommodate his singular vision.
Gaspar Orozco Book of the Peony
Translated from Spanish by Mark Weiss. Bilingual edition.
Published 2017. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615663 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Gaspar Orozco’s extraordinary Book of the Peony
blew me away by a storm of quiet flame and blackness and nothing everythingness. I am writing this from Pont-Aven, where I have come to write about colonies and gatherings of artists, before regaining (what an inapproprié word,) and suddenly this poetry hits me in the Breton chill with—I can’t say what—a dark blaze when I expected I have no idea what?
I had been thinking ah, peony, like pensée, like a beloved and delicate pansy of thought, but this peony is nearer the chrysanthemum of Japanese writing from long ago. This remarkable poetry brings the long ago into nowness, if I can put it like that. It lights from far and also near, burning.” —Mary Ann Caws
Gonca Özmen The Sea Within
Translated from Turkish by George Messo. Bilingual edition.
Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
SBN 9781848611481 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In just two short books, Gonca Özmen's startling and arresting poems have earned her an unprecedented reputation in Turkey. Her mysterious, dream-like imagery and her fresh, restless approach to language mark her as a poet of rare ambition and intelligence. In poems whose power to mourn and remember love, to celebrate and reinvent the sensuous appetites of the body, enacts a subtle, exacting beauty, Özmen's is a voice and spirit to be welcomed.
Manuela Palacios (ed.) Forked Tongues — Galician, Basque and Catalan Women's Poetry
Translated from Galician, Basque and Catalan by various Irish poets. Bilingual edition.
Published 2012. Paperback, 184pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
SBN 9781848612419 [Download a PDF with the introduction to this book here.]
Galicia, the Basque country and Catalonia have often found in Ireland an "inspiring Other" whether for political, social or cultural reasons. This anthology engages in an intercultural dialogue which redefines and strengthens the literary bonds among these communities. A selection of the most prominent Galician, Basque and Catalan contemporary women poets have their verse recreated in English by Irish writers. Together they enrich the European literary scene by celebrating its diversity.
Chus Pato Charenton
Translated from Galician by Erín Moure. English only.
Published 2007. Paperback, 116pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700332 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Chus Pato is the leading contemporary poet in Galicia. All of her work is written in the Galician language (Galego), but contrary perhaps to one's expectations of work written in what is a minority language, and one also long-repressed, her work is avant-garde, postmodern, and reflects the author's Marxist beliefs as well as her belief in the necessity of independence for Galicia. This is a radical poetry that, despite its remote origins, can speak powerfully across borders and languages.
Chus Pato m-Talá
Translated from Galician by Erín Moure
. English only.
Published 2009. Paperback, 108pp, 8.5x5.5ins. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610453 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In 2000 in Galicia, in a maelstrom of rupture from her previous poetics, well-known poet Chus Pato gave readers a startling new book that instantly demarcated the literary landscape. This book was a reverberative crescendo, a roar and clamour of genres and fictions for the multipled "I" in a time of unspeakable catastrophes: m-Talá.
Chus Pato Hordes of Writing
Translated from Galician by Erín Moure. English only.
Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848611672 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There was death and death entered love; writing mutated. Even so, when the poem writes itself, it is loyal only to its own wound; this is its law of gravity. Hordes of Writing, the third book in a projected pentalogy, Method, is an essential book from one of the most abysmal, mutant, indispensable and rupturist contemporary European poets.
