This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Said). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.
Yves Bonnefoy is the most important and influential French poet to have emerged since the Second World War. Poet, art critic, historian, translator (particularly of Shakespeare), specialist in the problem of the relation of poetry to the visual arts and to the history of religions, Bonnefoy is now considered one of the most distinguished men of letters of his generation. Though Bonnefoy's work is familiar to American scholars, the complexity of his thought and style has created a need for a critical introduction to his work. This first major study of Bonnefoy written in English provides an overview of his entire literary career. Naughton situates Bonnefoy in the context of the existential philosophical tradition that nurtured him and in the poetic and artistic tradition that includes Dante and Shakespeare, Piero and Poussin, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonnefoy's poems appear in both French and English, and all quotations from his prose have been translated. This book will appeal not only to the growing number of students and scholars of French literature interested in Bonnefoy's work, but also to those who study comparative poetry and the relation of poetry to art and to contemporary religious thought.
A selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English “A lush bouquet of essential poems from one of our species’ most urgent living poets. These are poems of testimony, of presence and the persistence of joy.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade. In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder—a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all. No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
Best Literary Translations is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the translators who create and literary journals that publish this work. Best Literary Translations 2024 features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages—including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu—brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid pieces were drawn from nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2023 that spanned more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages. The four series coeditors, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, selected the finalists from over five hundred nominations. By spotlighting work from top literary journals, Best Literary Translations honors the excellent literature created every year by a diverse range of authors and translators and will continue to expand the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the bold and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors annually, for years to come.
A much-anticipated follow-up to Nothing More to Lose, this is only the second poetry collection translated into English from a vital voice of Arabic literature. “We drag histories behind us,” the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish writes in Exhausted on the Cross, “here / where there’s neither land / nor sky.” In pared-down lines, brilliantly translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Darwish records what Raúl Zurita describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”—a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be a “colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion.” Darwish’s poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. We join the Persian poet Hafez in the conquered city of Shiraz and converse with the Prophet Mohammad in Medina. Poem after poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.
In a series of evocative vignettes, celebrated Iraqi poet Majed Mujed lyrically traverses the fraught landscapes of beauty, longing and resistance in a country at war. The Book of Trivialities, originally written in the poet’s native Arabic, is beautifully rendered into English by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
A brilliant new translation of the landmark poetry collection by “the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity” (Edward Said) Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s. Drawing not only on Western influences, such as T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, but on the deep tradition and history of Arabic poetry, Adonis accomplished a masterful and unprecedented transformation of the forms and themes of Arabic poetry, initiating a profound revaluation of cultural and poetic traditions. Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites—through Mediterranean myths and renegade Sufi mystics—what it means to be an Arab in the modern world.
This book establishes an analytical model for the description of existing translations in their historical context within a framework suggested by systemic concepts of literature. It argues against mainstream 20th-century translation theory and, by proposing a socio-cultural model of translation, takes into account how a translation functions in the receiving culture. The case studies of successive translations of "Hamlet" in France from the eighteenth century neoclassical version of Jean-Francois Ducis to the 20th-century Lacanian, post-structuralist stage production of Daniel Mesguich show the translator at work. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the changing theatrical and literary norms to which translators through the ages have been bound by the expectations both of their audiences and the literary establishment.
