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New American Library’s Signet Classics

 

  I pretty much grew up in the book business. While in high school I worked at a local used bookstore after school, on weekends, and during holidays. Mostly, I stocked and re-stocked paperbacks, helped customers, looked up titles in a 10 pound copy of Books in Print that the owner of the store had managed to pick up somewhere, and put mylar covers on hardcover dustjackets.  I didn’t make much - $1.65/hour - but I enjoyed the work. The fact is, most of the money I made went back into buying books. 

 

I remember marveling at the fact that customers would buy hardcover books when perfectly adequate paperback editions were available. I didn’t really have much of an appreciation at the time for any kind of notion of a “first edition” either.

I worked at Alphabooks for years off and on before eventually finding myself employed by what was then the B. Dalton/Pickwick chain first in El Cajon, CA and later in Encino, CA. From there I got a job in the general book department of the UCLA Bookstore, and after moving to San Francisco I wound up at the retail chain Crown Books (“Books Cost Too Much”).

Thankfully a job opened up with the mass market publisher Pocket Books in the Bay Area. The Pocket regional manager remembered me as a buyer at UCLA (he had actually been my sales rep and sold me books). I lasted a little more than a year at Pocket, during which time there were 2 or 3 major management changes, pretty typical for those days. At one point the Pocket reps even got a new name. We were rechristened "The Simon and Schuster Mass Merchandise Sale Force." That of course did not last long, and the yahoos who initiated that rebranding were gone from the company even before I was.

At the American Booksellers Association convention (the precursor to the Book Expo of America - BEA) in San Francisco in 1985 the big commercial books that year were James Michener's TEXAS, Harold Robbins’ JOE CROWN, Cynthia Freeman’s SEASONS OF THE HEART, Charles Schulz’s YOU DON'T LOOK 35, CHARLIE BROWN!, Jean Auel’s THE MAMMOTH HUNTERS, George Burns’ DEAR GEORGE, and Howard Fast’s IMMIGRANT'S DAUGHTER. Carl Sagan had two book offerings for the Fall of 1985 - a nonfiction book from Random House entitled COMET, and CONTACT, a novel from Simon & Schuster.

New American Library had recently purchased hardcover publisher E. P. Dutton,  the Wheatland Corporation (controlled by Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld) now owned Grove Press, Random House bought  Times Books, Simon & Schuster purchased Prentice-Hall, Macmillan in a feeding frenzy bought Scribner's, Atheneum, and Rawson Associates, in addition to the remains of Bobbs-Merrill, which it liquidated as quickly as it could. The consolidation of publishing was in full swing. 

Bill Targ, former editor for World Publishing Company and G. P. Putnam’s  Sons described the new corporate masters of American publishing as “megalomaniacs and wheeler-dealers” and “market analysts with slide rules up their arses and a power glint in their eyes.”

It was at the ABA convention in San Francisco that I was courted by the regional sales manager for New American Library, a man named Allan Wolfe. He wanted to hire me away from Pocket Books. I was thrilled at the prospect. I might have a chance to sell the Signet Classics. I had grown up with those books, and even though I was at the time a bit of a Penguin Classics snob, I strongly appreciated the Signet Classic line and was excited that I might have the opportunity to sell it into bookstores.

Of course, I made the jump to NAL, and of course they did not offer me anything additional in terms of salary to do so (NAL was always cheap). I knew I was a sucker, but I didn’t care. I was out of Pocket and into classics.

The widespread use of computers was not yet upon us, but the numbers on the printouts that came from the computer room were akin to gospel, so I would have to say that by the time that I came to NAL as a sales rep in 1985, the only change that I would have to make to Targ’s description of new corporate masters of American publishing cited earlier would be to substitute “slide rules” with “computer printouts.” The sales force in those days still consisted of a lot of old-timers, many of whom had worked on the ID (Independent Distributor, those who handled mostly magazine distribution) side of the business. Those fellows (and they all men) had lots of stories to share with anyone who wanted to listen (and even for those who didn’t) about drinking, wheeling and dealing, and the challenges of dealing with the colorful and difficult personalities who populated the ID side of the business. The stories sounded more like Mafia tales than anything connected to bookselling. I remember one ID sales rep who used to bring a gun to sales conference and sleep with it under his pillow. When his roommate came in late one night (in those days, only the big job title “position” folks got their own rooms, the rest of us were forced to share a room, with whomever the company decided to pair us with), he was greeted with the barrel of a gun in his face.

It was my good fortune to come into the industry as a sales rep at the exact time when the sales at drugstores and other non-book outlets were in decline. While still with Pocket Books I did have the exquisite pleasure of servicing a number of variety stores, including Woolworth’s. This would involve me writing an order, adding up both the retail and net dollar totals on an adding machine, and then submitting that order. No buyer was required, but I did have to come back when the order arrived and place the books on the racks. When I made my return trip to "rack" the books, I would generally move all of the Dell books to the bottom of the wire rack and put my books at the top. When the Dell rep came in he would do the same to my books. The trick was to figure out when the Dell rep made an appearance and then come in as soon as I could after that. I was thankful when that part of the business dried up, especially after I came into conflict with a Woolworth’s manager who wanted to know why I did not wear a tie when I called on them. I had to tell him that it was not my custom to wear a tie when I called on Woolworth’s. That did not go over well. I was lucky though, because had this been a few years earlier, I likely faced more serious reprecussions from my employers. By the time I got to NAL, this part of the business was on its way out.

 

While at NAL, I sold a lot of Signet Classics. In my used book travels (used books have always been my first love in the book world), I would seek out old edition of Signet Classics, particularly those that did not exist as such anymore, titles like:

Adventures In The Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas

The Duel and Selected Stories by Alexander Kuprin

The Queen of Spades and Other Tales by Alexander Pushkin

Specimen Days by Walt Whitman

The Golovlovs by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin

The Golden Serpent by Ciro Alegria

The Celtic Twilight and A Selection of Early Poems by W.B. Yeats

The Marquis of O-- and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist

The Restlessness of Shanti Andia and Selected Stories by Pio Baroja

La Salle and The Discovery of The Great West by Francis Parkman

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann

Burmese Days by George Orwell

Lyubka The Cossack and Other Stories by Isaac Babel

The Merry-Go-Round of Love and Selected Stories by Luigi Pirandello

Selected Prose and Poetry of Giacomo Leopardi

    

    

    

Can you imagine a mass market publisher doing these books today?

It was not long before I had amassed a small collection of these gems, but then I had to wonder – what about any that I might not know about?  Of course, that led to me creating a listing in series number order of every Signet Classics that I could find.

My list was missing a lot of information, so I contacted Gayle Greeno in the NAL office. At the time I believe that she had something to do with educational sales. She went on to become a best-selling DAW fantasy author. Gayle thought I was crazy, but she was kind enough to provide me with a printout of the entire Signet Classics list, numbers 1 through 1000. That was like the Holy Grail for me. I used the information from the printout to build a more comprehensive list.

After a time I left NAL, which had since become Penguin in the continuing series of publishing purchases/mergers. Periodically though, I updated my listing of Signet Classics, and eventually included more descriptive material, and even images. It still amazes me that the Signet Classics line managed to publish so many terrific books in a business environment that could not always have been very hospitable to such a project, particularly after the early days of the series. I can only imagine the history of the project as that of a few truly visionary individuals somehow getting their projects past the “money” men of the company to achieve something really revolutionary in paperback publishing.        

 As early as 1836 British companies were producing cheap “yellowback” books, mostly reprints, for a mass audience of readers as literary rates rose in England. Publishers in Germany, mostly notably Reclam of Leipzig, created their own cheap paper reprint editions with their Universal-Bibliothek mass market series in 1867. Reclam also became the first company to introduce book vending machines to Germany.

While the 19th century brought numerous improvements in the printing, publishing and book-distribution processes, particularly with the introduction of such technology as the steam-powered printing presses, pulp mills, automatic type-setting, and a network of railways, it wasn’t until the German publisher Albatross Books streamlined the paperback format in 1931 that the real seeds of a 20th century paperback revolution were truly sown. Albatross came up with a new standardized size (181 x 111 mm), and used sans-serif fonts designed by British typographer Stanley Morison. They also color-coded their titles by according to genre. The series was very successful for Albatross Books until the advent of World War II put an end to their publishing experiment. In 1935 however, Penguin Books adopted many of Albatross' innovations, including a conspicuous logo and color-coded covers for different genres. British publisher Allen Lane launched the Penguin Books imprint in 1935 with only ten reprint titles and began a paperback revolution in the English-language book-market. Lane’s ambition was to produce inexpensive books and sell a lot of them.

  

After purchasing paperback rights from publishers, Lane would do what were then large print runs, sometimes as many as 20,000 copies of a book. It was all part of his strategy to keep his unit cost low. Booksellers were a little skeptical of the new format a first, so Lane explored non-traditional market, like department stores, including Woolworth’s. It didn’t take long for the idea to catch on and as bookstores began carrying Lane’s books, "Penguin" became closely associated with the word "paperback.”

Robert de Graaf created Pocket Books in partnership with Simon & Schuster in 1939 and “pocket book” synonymous with the paperback in the United States.  The biggest difference of substance between Penguin and Pocket Books was probably their different approach to cover treatments. De Graaf also aimed for a broad appeal and utilized the magazine and newspaper distribution networks to reach that audience.

 

British Penguins opened an office in New York in July of 1939, tasked with importing Penguins and Pelicans to the United States. They started with 100 British Penguin, a staff of two, and hired a young American to direct the branch named Ian Ballantine.

Given that the imports first needed to come from England to New York, and then be distributed to American booksellers, the American Penguin office found themselves at a serious disadvantage in terms of getting and keeping the right titles in stock to fill demand. They needed an effective system of distribution akin to what Pocket Books had already created. It was necessary to choose titles carefully when it came to importing.

Penguin grew slowly, a little too slowly for Allen Lane, the head of British Penguin, who was not entirely impressed with Ballantine’s results. He reached out to Kurt Enoch, who had escaped the Nazis in Germany, and made him the vie-president of Penguin Books, Inc.  In 1943 Enoch hired Gobin Stair to oversee production and design. Stair in turn hired a number of illustrators like H. Lawrence Hoffman and Lester Kohs to produce cover of good taste and relative modesty, but still different than the British Penguin which at the time consisted exclusively of typographical styled covers. These new cover treatments did not please Allen Lane, who thought the cover art perhaps a little too garish. The true is that nearly all of the other paperback publishers at the time were producing covers with more innovative artwork, and Ballantine and Enoch did not think that the strictly typographical cover had a chance of selling in the States. They were simply too different from their competition, and not in a good way. A split with Penguin in England was inevitable. Enoch had hired a cover artist named Robert Jonas, who designed the cover of Erskine Caldwell’s TROUBLE IN JULY in 1945. Jonas had strong beliefs about balancing social consciousness with art and had an enormous impact on the artwork of the American Penguins of that time.

Also in 1945, Ian Ballantine left the American branch of Penguin to start Bantam Books and Victor Weybright became part of Penguin’s management. While the relationship with British Penguin was a decent one, Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright decided in 1948 start their own publishing company, the New American Library of World Literature, Inc. (NAL), and Signet books made their first appearance in the summer of 1948.

 

 They broke their ties with British Penguin and after a short period where a few “Penguin Signets” and “Penguin Mentors” still appeared, dropped “Penguin” from the imprint names altogether. Mentor Books, as a quality line of nonfiction (their slogan "Good Reading for the Millions."), was most certainly an outgrowth of Pelican in the UK, as the Signet Classics line became the American version of the Penguin Classic.

Victor Weybright had his fans and his detractors. He no doubt had vision. Andre Schiffren called him “ a flamboyant man who gloried in his snobberies and pretensions,” who managed to surround himself with talented editors. Schiffrin also noted Weybright’s “unmitigated anti-Semitism” in his THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS published in 2000 by Verso. E. L. Doctorow, when a NAL editor, had this to say regarding Weybright – “He had a good restless mind and loved to wheel and deal.” On the other hand Weybright was in his estimation susceptible to people who knew that Weybright had aspirations to “be one of the ‘big boys’.”

Kurt Enoch received better treatment by Schiffren, perhaps because Enoch was the one who actually hired Schiffren. Enoch was described as a “small, trim, very shy, and a model German intellectual,” who had an early understanding of the importance of the paperback, perhaps because he had been one of the founders of Albatross in Germany

Weybright clearly had a good editorial eye. In addition to bringing Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming’s James Bond books to NAL’s and insuring the company’s commercial position in the industry, his decision to publish a number of African-American authors of the day , including William Motley, Richard Wright, William Gardener Smith, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, was visionary.

   

The Signet list was not only a commercial success. They received critical praise for the list of important author that they had assembled, including works by William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, D. H. Lawrence, Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ken Kesey, Sinclair Lewis, Margaret Mead, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Bowles, Curzio Malaparte, Alberto Moravia, and J. D. Salinger. All this and they still produced plenty of westerns and other genre titles too. 

   

   At one point Robert Jonas, designer and artist, stopped illustrating Signet Westerns and started producing most of the covers (more than 95% through the 1950s) of the Mentor covers. He was also responsible for the typography of the Signet covers. By the mid-1950s both Signet and Mentor covers had been given a more modern look under the direction of Bill Gregory, who replaced John Legakes as art director in 1961. It was Gregory who would produce new colophons and brought a brand new look to New American Library’s line of Signet Classics with launched in 1959.

By 1960 most of the paperback publishing house were producing public domain classic geared to a school audience, both secondary and college. Many of these lines were clearly influenced by the British Penguin and Pelicans, and cover artists like Edward Gorey (Anchor) and Leonard Baskin (Vintage) were highly sought after.

 The Signet Classics line had a reputation for success with their cover illustrations by employing a variety of artists, many of whom had never illustrated book covers before, but were well known as illustrators. Milton Glaser designed the Signet Classics Shakespeare series and received a number of awards for his cover artwork.   

When the first Signet Classics were published, NAL was at a peak of their financial success. Even though both Bantam and Pocket Books had their own lines of classics, the Signet Classics line quickly became the dominant mass market publisher of classics.

 

Before starting at Pantheon, the small publisher that his father Jacques Schiffrin had started, Andre Schiffrin worked for New American Library. According to Andre Schiffren in his book THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS, it was a memo that he wrote to editor Arabel Porter suggesting possibilities for the first Signet Classics that helped to spark a favorable response to the idea and led to the publishing of the series.

  

  Arabel Porter was considered something of a “high priestess among young writers,” and was described as a quiet and unpretentious intellectual. She was the force behind New American Library’s New World Writing literary magazine, published between 1952 and 1959, which was  modeled partly on John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing , published in England from 1940-1950.   New World Writing was published in fifteen biannual issues and featured works of fiction, drama, essays, and poetry by new and leading writers from around the world. Contributors included Gore Vidal, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, E. E. Cummings, Jean Genet, André Gide, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Pablo Picasso, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, Wallace Stevens, Eugène Ionesco, Octavio Paz and Tennessee Williams. The corrected typescript of "Catch-18" by Joseph Heller, which eventually became the first chapter of Catch-22,  was originally published in issue #7. According to her boss, Victor Weybright, Arabel J. Porter was ‘a Bohemian Quakeress, with inspired eyes and ears which seem to see and hear all the significant manifestations of the literary, dramatic and graphic arts.’ Marc Jaffe referred to her thusly – “She was a very warm person,” and he added that she was sensitive to the words on a page.

 

 

 

Considering that the very first Signet Classic turned out to be a book that Schiffren proposed, the 19th century French classic Adolphe and the Red Notebook by Benjamin Constant (CD1), I would say that Andre Schiffren can indeed lay claim to being a major player in the creation of the Classics series.

“In these two remarkable works, a brilliant, vain, long - suffering Frenchman describes the first twenty years of his life and their culmination in a tortured love affair with an older, possessive woman of the world. Benjamin Constant attempted to conceal the fact that these two books were autobiographical. But to his familiars, it was clear that he himself was Adolphe. And in the intimate account of his strange liaison with Ellénore, he may well have been protesting against his inexorable bondage to his fiery, demanding mistress, Madame de Staël. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a champion of liberalism and the author of the History of Religion. But posterity remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe.”

NAL also published new editions of classic works — for example, a Shakespeare series — which featured renowned scholars, editors, and translators; many of these editions were oriented toward high school and college readership. Even before the acquisition by Times Mirror, Victor Weybright had been interested in creating a well-edited series of Shakespeare’s plays. He contacted Sylvan Barnet of Tufts University and over a bowl of corn flakes and coffee they came up with a tentative deal where Barnet would serve as the general editor of the Signet Classics Shakespeare series and find other specific editors for each individual volume. There is little doubt that the Signet Classics Shakespeare series was created partly to directly compete with Pocket’s Folger Library editions of Shakespeare’s plays.

 

Signet even at one point had plans to publish a Signet Classic edition of CATCHER IN THE RYE by J. D. Salinger, but that wound up getting scuttled due to Salinger’s displeasure with deliberations over the paperback cover of the book. He also didn’t want a foreword or an afterword, even if it was by a notable critic. It didn’t help that such an amazingly popular author refused to allow his picture on earlier paperback editions. There was even a suggestion to have a line drawing made of Salinger much like the author portraits that appeared on the front free endpaper accompanying a short biographical piece of each Signet Classic, particularly in the earlier editions. That wasn’t going to fly with Salinger. An internal memo from August 17, 1959) signed by both Truman Talley and Peter Gruenthal settled it, “Please drop Catcher in the Rye from the February, 1960 list of Signet Classics. This title will probably not reappear on future Signet Classic lists due to unusual author-trade publisher-NAL relationship.” Coincidentally, that same month saw the publication of the inaugural batch of the Signet Classics line. Salinger went on to Bantam who publishes him to this day. The rather nondescript typographical covers of the Bantam edition were of course designed by Salinger himself.

In 1959, paperbacks were distributed to the 4,000 bookstore covering the United States at the time and through what were called ID (Independent Distributors) wholesalers, to the many non-bookstore accounts across the country – newsstands, drug stores, grocery stores, etc., numbering over 70,000 outlets. The ID wholesalers grew out of the old magazine distribution network that had come into being during Prohibition to distribute racing forms, and quite possibly alcohol itself. They started with magazines, but as the paperback revolution took hold, they began distributing books as well. Returns were high with the IDs though, so the risk was great even though the payoff could be substantial when a title worked for them.    

With Kurt Enoch devoting himself to the business end of NAL – production, sales, and distribution – and Victor Weybright focusing on the editorial aspects, NAL was not only receiving the praise for readers, critics, and educators, they had become a very profitable publisher. NAL had achieved that balance between commercialism and editorial excellence, and by the late 1950s NAL had grown to be the largest paperback house in the country. 

To secure NAL’s future Enoch and Weybright decided that the best way was for the company to go public. They made overtures to Times Mirror, and a final agreement between the two parties went into effect on March 24, 1960. The merger had positive results for Times Mirror immediately, meaning that their stock rose. Unfortunately though, tensions between Enoch and Weybright increased, leading to Weybright’s eventual resignation from NAL.   

The continual corporate interference in matters editorial however led both Victor Weybright and Truman Talley to leave the company in 1966. Publishing had entered the era of the corporate manager. Many of the most talented of the NAL editorial staff wound up leaving as a result – E. L. Doctorow to Dial press, Arabel Porter to Houghton Mifflin, and Marc Jaffe to Bantam.

New American Library changed ownership hands three times over a period of 27 years. In 1960 Times Mirror of Los Angeles owned by the Chandler family and publishers of the Los Angeles Times, bought NAL (at the time the second ranking paperback publisher in size and power). Although NAL supposedly operated autonomously within the Mirror Company structure, and NAL's management remained unchanged, they were soon to become just another mass market line. In the 1970s President of New American Library Herbert K. Schnall said that “it almost doesn’t pay to buy something for under $100,000,” reflecting a more corporate mentality towards acquisitions.

In 1983 Odyssey Partners and Ira J. Hechler bought NAL from the Times Mirror Company for over $50 million. In 1987, the NAL was reintegrated by purchase into the Penguin Publishing Company, its original parent company. On February 22, 1985 NAL announced its purchase of E. P. Dutton, and in 1986 Peter Mayer, chief executive officer of Penguin Publishing announced Penguin’s purchase of NAL. As NAL’s CEO, Robert Diforio said in a speech to the sales force at the time, “We’ve come home again.” It sounded about as corny as much of what came out of Bob Diforio’s mouth when he was on stage, but he was right.

 

 

Sources cited –

 

Books:

 

Baines, Phil. Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005. New York. 2005. Penguin Books. 255 pages. 9780141024233

  The extraordinary story of Penguin coven and their rich and diverse design heritage. Ever since the creation of the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935, their jackets have become a constantly evolving part of Britain’s culture and design history. Rich with stunning illustrations and filled with details of individual titles, designers and even the changing size and shape of the Penguin logo itself, this book shows how covers become in design classics. By looking back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, Phil Baines charts the development of British publishing, book-cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look. Coupling in-depth analysis of designers - from Jan Tschichold to Romek Marber - with a broad survey of the range of series and titles published - from early Penguins and Pelicans, to wartime and 1960s Specials, Classics, fiction and reference - this is a distinctive picture of how Penguin has consistently established its identity through its covers, influenced by – and influencing - the wider development of graphic design and the changing fashions in typography, photography, illustration and printing techniques. Filled with inspiring images, PENGUIN BY DESIGN demonstrates just how difficult it is not to judge a book by its cover. Phil Baines was born in Kendal, Westmorland, in 1958. He graduated from St Martin’s School of Art in 1985 and the Royal College of Art in 1987, and has been a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design since 1991. He is author and designer of TYPE & TYPOGRAPHY (with Andrew Haslam, 2002) and SIGNS: LETTERING IN THE ENVIRONMENT (with Catherine Dixon, 2003), both published by Laurence King. He is also a freelance graphic designer whose clients have included the Crafts Council, Goethe-Institut London, Matt’s Gallery and Monotype Typography. His work often includes the use of his own typefaces, three of which have been released for general use: Can You? (1991) and Ushaw (1994) by Fuse,and Vere Dignum by Linotype in 2003.

 

Bonn, Thomas L. Heavy Traffic & High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution. Carbondale. 1989. Southern Illinois University Press. 241 pages. 0809314789

   This is a book about the magical names in literature, about the literary heritage of a nation balanced against a backdrop of big business; it is the story of New American library from 1946 to 1961 and of Victor Weybright, the publisher whose talismanic phrase, ‘luster and lucre,’ characterizes both the cultural and financial formu1a that guided this giant paperback house. The book is based on the editorial correspondence at NAL from the company’s beginning in 1945 until just after its purchase by the Times-Mirror Company. Generally ignoring financial, marketing, and production records, the files that form the core of this book concentrate on interoffice memoranda to and from editorial staff and feature letters to and from authors, agents, publishers, and readers. Bonn shows how Weybright and copublisher Kurt Enoch advanced NAL from a poor, scarcely tolerated relation - as were all paperback reprinters - in the publishing family to a prestigious, even proprietary publisher, initiating contracts and discovering new talent. By the middle of the l950s, many hardcover publishing houses were accepting original manuscripts based on their anticipated mass market paperback sales. Bonn employs the ‘gatekeeper’ theory of communication to account for much of NAL’s success, citing Weybright as chief gatekeeper. Explaining this theory as Weybright applied it, Bonn notes that ‘the tension on the gate’s spring is created by the cultural contribution the work is likely to make tempered by its projected balance sheet.’ Weybright brought harmony to the conflicting interests of culture vs. commerce; his goal was ‘heavy traffic, high culture’ or John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway and others at the dimly remembered 25 cents per copy. Bonn focuses on Weybright’s dealings with Bennett Cerf and Random House, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Alfred A. Knopf, and other hardback houses to show how NAL acquired titles. In this book, notable for its previously unpublished correspondence by major figures, Bonn scores another triumph by examining the phenomenon of paperback abridgment. These letters reveal the reactions of James M. Cain, James Jones, and Robert Penn Warren when paperback economics killed as many as half of their words. Well-founded fear of censorship, these files reveal, consumed much money and time, yet of all of the books on the NAL list, only Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre was judged obscene in a courtroom. The works of James M. Cain were challenged, as were those of Faulkner, until he won his 1950 Nobel Prize. Weybright also faced a continuing battle with certain authors over paperback covers. The editor’s views as to what would sell books frequently conflicted with the opinions of his authors. William Styron acquiesced to Weybright with some grace, but the cover conflict between NAL and James T. Farrell was bitter; the rift between NAL and J. D. Salinger over covers for The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories grew so acrimonious that both sides lost when Salinger severed his relationship with the company. NAL published the great—William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger - and the big money-makers - Erskine Caldwell, Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane. This ideal arrangement enabled the innovative paperback publishing company to make a profit even as it made a gigantic cultural contribution.

 

Bonn, Thomas L. Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks. New York. 1982. Penguin Books. 144 pages. 0140060715

 Following the evolution of mass market publishing - cover to cover to cover - in this delightful celebration of paperback books. From the wonderfully lurid covers of the forties and fifties (featuring ‘fleshy female victims of mayhem and murder’) to today’s specialized genre styles, this fascinating history focuses on paperback covers - the crucial factor in catching the eye and selling the book. The splendid illustrations and the odd facts, colorful anecdotes, and insider’s insights make Under Cover a rare treat for pop-culture buffs, designers, collectors, and book people of all kinds.

Thomas L. Bonn, Librarian at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, is the author of Paperback Primer: A Guide for Collectors and Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks.

 

 

 

Coser, Lewis A. / Kadushin, Charles / Powell, Walter W.. Books: The Culture & Commerce Of Publishing. New York. 1982. Basic Books. 411 pages. 0465007457

 In an industry perilously poised between the world of culture and the demands of commerce, who decides what America reads? Editors, media packagers, the heads of large corporations, or the intellectual community? This major work by a team of distinguished socio1ogists provides the first comprehensive examinations of book publishing in America - the people, the organizations, and the network of information and gossip - nor only for trade books and blockbusters, but for college texts, scholarly and monograph publishing, and university presses. Based on extensive field research in a variety of houses and on hundreds of interviews with editors, publishers, authors, agents, marketing and sales staffs, booksellers and book reviewers, BOOKS discusses the inside operation of publishing house and shows how key outsiders – literary agents, reviewers, and book chains as well as independent booksellers – can make or break a book’s (and an author’s) fortunes. The authors explode widely held publishing myths, explain editorial career paths, reveal the anomalous position of secretaries and assistants, and explore the role of women and their changing status. Special attention is paid to the deteriorating quality of author-publisher relations, and to whether authors can do anything about it. Presenting the big picture of the industry, BOOKS analyzes the mixed effects of the recent wave of publishing mergers. Though a historic al review suggests that publishers have always cared about the bottom line, the difference today is that editors no longer make all the key decisions. BOOKS is required reading for everyone interested in the book industry - as well as an exciting contribution to the sociology of ideas and organizations.  ‘A pioneering sociological panorama of American world of books, presented with unmistakable touch of its accomplished authors.’ - ROBERT K. MERTON, University Professor Emeritus and Special Service Professor, Department of Sociology, Columbia University. LEWIS A. COSER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is the author of many hooks, including Men of ideas (1965), Greedy institutions (1974), and Masters of Sociological Thought (1979). CHARLES KADUSHIN- is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the author of several books, including The American Intellectual Elite (1974). WALTER W. POWELL is Assistant Profess or in the School of Organization and Management and Department of Sociology, Yale University, and the author of the forthcoming Getting into Print: The Decision Making Process in Scholarly Publishing (1982). He is also affiliated with Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, where he is studyi ng the financing of public television.

 

Davis, Kenneth C.. Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking Of America. Boston. 1984. Houghton Mifflin. 430 pages. 0395343984

 Dr. Spock, Betty Freidan, J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, John F. Kennedy, William Golding, D. H. Lawrence, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Rimmer, Kate Millett, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller - What is the single innovation in mass media that gave all these writers the ability to profoundly influence modern American culture? The paperback. Since their modest beginnings at the outset of World War II, inexpensive paperback books have grown into an eight-hundred-million-dollar-a-year industry and now overflow the country’s newsstands and bookshelves. From intellectually respectable classics such a Waiting for Godot, Lord of the Flies, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to trendy novels like Peyton Place Love Story and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, paperbacks have had an unparalleled ability to shape the tastes and opinions of literate America. Kenneth C. Davis’s Two-Bit Culture chronicles the Paperback Revolution - the men and the women, the companies and the characters, that enabled American writers to find American readers by the millions.  Crammed with facts as well as gossip, Two-Bit Culture not only brings to life the history of the paperback but examines its present state and predicts where this fascinating business may be heading. ‘Must reading for anyone who wants to understand American publishing and popular culture since World War II. A sterling achievement.’ -  Marc Jaffe.

 

Schiffrin, Andre. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing & Changed The Way We Read. New York. 2000. Verso. 181 pages. 1859847633

 Postwar American publishing has been ruthlessly transformed since André Schiffrin joined its ranks in 1956. Gone is a plethora of small but prestigious houses that often put ideas before profit in their publishing decisions, sometimes even deliberately. Now six behemoths share 80% of the market and profit margin is all. André Schiffrin can write about these changes with authority because he witnessed them from inside a conglomerate, as head of Pantheon, co-founded by his father bought (and sold) by Random House. And he can write about them with candor because he is no longer on the inside, having quit corporate publishing in disgust to setup a flourishing independent house, the New Press. Schiffrin’s evident affection for his authors sparkles throughout a story woven around publishing the work of those such as Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Juliet Mitchell, R.D.Laing, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Part-memoir, part-history, here is an account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing that is irascible, acute and passionate. An engaging counterpoint to recent, celebratory memoirs of the industry written by those with more stock options and fewer scruples than Schiffrin, The Business of Books warns of the danger to adventurous, intelligent publishing in the bullring of today’s marketplace. André Schiffrin was, for thirty years, Publisher at Pantheon. He is the Director of the New Press, which he founded in 1993. He contributes a regular column on publishing to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Schreuders, Piet. Paperbacks, U. S. A.: A Graphic History, 1939-1959 (Translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter). San Diego. 1981. Blue Dolphin Enterprises. 259 pages.

 In this informative and entertaining description of the first 20 years of paperback history, the emphasis is on the way these early books looked, and especially on their covers: who made them, how they were produced, and how they changed over two decades. Piet Schreuders, editor and designer of two popular Dutch magazines (Furore and the Poezenkrant), spent five years researching the roots of this cultural phenomenon and found, besides shameless plagiarism, amateurish drawings and commercially-bred bad taste, a wealth of sensitive, human, original and unique design and art.

 

 

 

 

Weybright, Victor. The Making of a Publisher: A Life in the 20th Century Book Revolution. New York. 1967. Reynal & Company. 360 pages.

 

 ‘When the story of The Paperback Revolution in America is one day told, it will be Victor Weybright’s THE MAKING OF A PUBLISHER that will serve as primary source material. Mr. Weybright was at the forefront of the rebellion to bring reading to everyone. And here, for the first time, performing as a Pepys of the paperback world, he opens locked doors and tells what went on inside the nobility, the pettiness, the triumphs, the failures, the Name publishers and authors one man’s truth about the movement to perpetuate the printed word against the forces of television and the machine. I recommend this memoir to everyone interested in books - publishers, editors, instructors, students - and Constant Readers.’ - Irving Wallace. This is the life story of a man who grew up in the Maryland countryside and whose zeal for learning and literature enabled him to become a leader in today’s book revolution. Although paperback books originally consisted largely of popular titles, he introduced books of genuine quality through The New American Library and changed the character and impact of low-priced publishing. One of the early influences in Mr. Weybright’s life was his experience at Hull House. During the war years he served in the American Embassy in London where he became well known in literary as well as political and social circles. After the war he returned to found his hugely successful publishing house. Throughout his life he has traveled widely and has come to know people of importance on both sides of the Atlantic who occupy a large part of this highly readable and always informative book. ‘I have read this with particular interest. Nobody has deserved better of the republic of letters than has Victor, a man who has combined a continuing sense of social responsibility with inventiveness in the book world, considerable daring in the discovery and promotion of young talent, and services to his government and to the Western world over and beyond the call of duty. I have read the book with a combination of interest and sorrow. The interest arises from the revelations of publishing history it contains nobody can ask a better introduction to the history of the paperback book revolution — and sorrow about its ending.’ - Howard Mumford Jones.

 

  

Internet:

 

Bookscans.com

Signet Classic FACEBOOK page

http://observer.com/2011/07/how-catch-18-became-catch-14-and-finally-catch-22/

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/27/books/publishers-displaying-wares-in-san-francisco.html

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Insurgent Mexico by John Reed. New York. 1914. D. Appleton and Company. 326 pages. hardcover. 

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

A firsthand account of the Mexican Revolution. American journalist John 'Jack' Reed writes, on the scene, describing the Mexican Revolution of 1914. He gives an excellent and realistic account of the Mexican Indians and peons that have suffered under a brutal dictatorship. He writes about the time he spent in Northern Mexico with Pancho Villa and the war in the desert.

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Reed (Portland, Oregon, October 22, 1887 - Moscow, October 17, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, best remembered for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD. He was married to writer and feminist Louise Bryant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Partner by Jenaro Prieto. London. 1931. Thornton Butterworth. Translated from the Spanish by Blanca De Roig & Guy Dowler. 256 pages. hardcover.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

To write a fantasia that deepens into a thing of pity and horror without degenerating into mere unconvincing sensationalism is no mean achievement. It has been accomplished in ‘The Partner,' the story of Pardo, a Chilean business man, who invents an English partner, one Davis, as an excuse for rejecting embarrassing financial propositions. To his horror, he finds that a great many people are deeply interested in Davis, and diverting complications ensue. Comedy, however, changes to tragedy and Spenlow's Jorkins becomes Frankenstein's monster, finally overwhelming his creator. This unforgettable story grips the reader from the first page to the last. 

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jenaro Prieto (5 August 1889, Santiago, Chile - 5 March 1946, Chile) was Chilean journalist, writer and politician. He served as a member of the National Congress of Chile for the Conservative Party during the 1930s. Amongst his best known works as a writer is the novel The Partner (1928) which has been turned into several films.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction by Arundhati Roy. Chicago. 2019. Haymarket Books. 9781608466733. Paperback Original. 1000 pages. paperback. Cover and author photographs by Mayank Austen Soofi.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

Twenty years, a thousand pages, and now a single beautiful edition of Arundhati Roy's complete nonfiction.   Bookended by her two extraordinary novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights, and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment.   Radical and superbly readable, the essays speak in a voice of unique spirit, marked by compassion, clarity, and courage. Roy offers a powerful defense of the collective, of the individual, and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites.   In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from "The End of Imagination," which begins this book, to "My Seditious Heart," with which it ends.   Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.  

 

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author who is best known for the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), which became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also known as a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail. Bulgakov. New York. 1967. Harper & Row. Translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny. 394 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Mercer Mayer. 

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

The time is the 1920's. The place is Moscow. The story begins as the Devil appears with a retinue including a naked girl vampire with red hair and phosphorescent eyes and a huge black cat that smokes cigars and is a dead shot with a Browning automatic. Havoc descends on the city. The Devil kills some, drives others insane, spirits some to distant places, holds a witches' Sabbath where women rub their bodies with magic ointment and fly naked through the air on broomsticks. The Devil's antics bring out the worst in everyone - weakness, greed, cowardice - as Bulgakov lampoons the institutions he hated most: medicine, the theater, the clique-ridden literary world, bureaucracy and orthodoxy. Only two defy the demonic trickery - the Master, a writer dedicated to the search for truth, who has put all his wisdom into a book on Christ and Pilate that no publisher will accept, and Margarita, who literally goes through hell to save the Master's sanity (he has voluntarily entered a mental hospital) so that he may rewrite the masterpiece he has burned in despair. Their integrity and devotion defy and defeat the Devil's power. Each reader will enjoy and interpret this bizarre and comic fantasy in his own way. Its rich and uproarious black humor, its devastating satire on the effect of evil on human beings, its tragic yet triumphant and powerful story of good and truth are many stories in one. A stunning modern parable, it is in the great tradition of Russian literature. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, regarded as Bulgakov's greatest work, was published in the winter of 1966-67, in two issues of Moskva. About 23,000 words, some in brief phrases, some in extended passages, which were omitted from the Moskva version, have been restored throughout, as they are in the Harvill-Collins British edition and the Einaudi Italian edition also.

 

And, the first translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece - 

 

 

 The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Dana Point. 1995. Ardis Publishers. Translated From The Russian By Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. 367 pages. 0875010679.

 

The Devil visits 1920s Moscow and reeks havoc in this black comedy of the effects of evil and the power of truth.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

   This is the first translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece, and the first annotated edition. A literary sensation from its first publication, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA has become an astonishing publishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature. In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the capital of world atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. Margarita, the despairing and daring heroine, becomes a witch in an effort to save the Master, and agrees to become the devil's hostess at his annual spring ball by turns acidly satiric, fantastic, and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem. In a brilliant tour de force, Bulgakov provides a startlingly different version of Pontius Pilate's encounter with one Yeshua, a naive believer in the goodness of man. The interplay of these two narratives is part of the ingenious pleasure of this work which defies all genre classifications and expectations. The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here, for the first time, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is revealed in all its complexity.

 

 

 

 Eldest son of a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in that city in 1891. After graduating in. medicine at Kiev University, Bulgakov was sent in 1916 (as an alternative to army service) to his first practice in a remote country region of one of the north-western provinces of Russia. There he worked for two years in sole charge of a local govenment clinic serving a large and scattered rural population. Late in 1918, after a spell as a hospital intern, Bulgakov returned to his native Kiev, where he set up in private practice as a specialist in venereology. Driven out, it seems, by the intolerable strains imposed on a doctor in a city racked by civil war, he left Kiev for the Caucasus; it was at this time, in 1919 or 1920, that Bulgakov resolved to give up medicine for a full-time literary career. Moving north to Moscow in the early twenties, Bulgakov endured a period of hardship and struggle to gain recognition as a writer. His first success was his novel The White Guard, originally published in serial form in 1925 and based on his experience of Kiev in the civil war, which he turned into a play for the Moscow Arts Theatre with the altered title of The Days of the Titrbins. From then on Bulgakov’s career was intimately bound up with the stage, in particular with the Moscow Arts Theatre under the joint direction of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, where he worked as an. assistant producer and resident dramatist until his break with Stanislavsky in 1936. After some time spent as an opera librettist with the Bolshoi Theatre, he was reduced to literary impotence by Stalin’s increasingly harsh censorship. Bulgakov fell ill with a painful kidney complaint in 1939, went blind as a result of the disease and died in March 1940. In addition to the stories in the present collection (first published in two magazines in the mid-twenties) Bulgakov wrote altogether fourteen plays, three novels and a rich and varied collection of satirical stories. Although many of his works still remain unpublished in the USSR, enough of his best books and plays have appeared posthumously, between 1955 and 1967, to have secured for Mikhail Bulgakov a place as one of the most original and powerful Russian writers of the twentieth century. Diana Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and chairperson of the Modern Language Department. Her book, SOPHIA PARNOK: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RUSSIA’S SAPPHO was published earlier this year. Katherine Tiernan O’Connor is Professor of Russian at Boston University and the author of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life: The Illusion of Narrative. She it currently writing a book on Chekhov’s letters. Ellendea Proffer has translated plays and prose by Bulgakov, and is the author of MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: LIFE AND WORK.

 

Diana Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and chairperson of the Modern Language Department. Her book, SOPHIA PARNOK: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RUSSIA'S SAPPHO was published earlier this year. Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is Professor of Russian at Boston University and the author of Boris Pasternak's My Sister--Life: The Illusion of Narrative. She it currently writing a book on Chekhov's letters. Ellendea Proffer has translated plays and prose by Bulgakov, and is the author of MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: LIFE AND WORK.

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In Praise of Black Women, Volume 1: Ancient African Queens by Simon Schwarz-Bart. Madison. 2001. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from The French By Rose-Myriam Rejouis, Val Vinokurov, and Stephanie Daval. Foreword by Howard Dodson. 448 pages. 0299172503.

 

A magnificently illustrated tribute to black women in art and story.

 

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from the ancient past to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupian novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. Volume 1: Ancient African Queens weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and travelers' tales from Egypt to southern Africa, from prehistory to the nineteenth century. These women rulers, warriors, and heroines include Amanirenas, the queen of Kush who battled Roman armies and defeated them at Aswan; Daurama, mother of the seven Hausa kingdoms; Amina Kulibali, founder of the Gabu dynasty in Senegal; Ana de Sousa Nzinga, who resisted the Portuguese conquest of Angola; Beatrice Kimpa Vita, a Kongo prophet burned at the stake by Christian missionaries; Nanda, mother of the famous warrior-king Shaka Zulu; and many others. These extraordinary women's stories, narrated in the style of African oral tradition, are absorbing, informative, and accessible. The abundant illustrations, many of them rare archival images, depict the diversity among Black women and make this volume a unique treasure for every art lover, every school, and every family. Copublished with Modus Vivendi Publications. Simone Schwarz-Bart is the author of six novels and a play, which have been translated and published in many languages; BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND have been published in English.

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In Praise of Black Women, Volume 2: Heroines of the Slavery Era by Simon Schwarz-Bart. Madison. 2002. University Of Wisconsin Press. Translated from The French By Rose-Myriam Rejouis, Val Vinokurov, and Stephanie Daval. Foreword by Howard Dodson. 258 pages. Jacket design: Ben Neff. Jacket illustration: Portrait of Sojourner Truth. 0299172600. October 2002.

 

 

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

   VOLUME 2: HEROINES OF THE SLAVERY ERA Translated by Rose-Myriam Rejouts, Val Vinokurov, and Stephanie Daval With a Foreword by Howard Dodson. IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from ancient times to the present. Lavishly illustrated. with text written and selected by the renowned Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. VOLUME 2: HEROINES OF THE SLAVERY ERA weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil’s blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest of the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad, who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband; Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery; and many others. A magnificent tribute to black women From the ancient past to the present. Hundreds of rare archival images. Fascinating stories of women’s legacy to world culture. A treasure For every family and school.

 

 

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In Praise of Black Women, Volume 3: Modern African Women by Simon Schwarz-Bart. Madison. 2003. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated From The French By Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. 258 pages. Cover - Ben Neff/Jacket photo: Myriam Makeba. Olympia 1971. 0299172708. April 2003.

 

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

   MODERN AFRICAN WOMEN offers powerful and unforgettable tales from Senegal to South Africa, from the nineteenth century to the present. These modern African rulers, leaders, and visionaries include Madam Yoko, Queen of the Kpaa Mende and national heroine of Sierra Leone; Princess Kesso, a Fulani Muslim princess from Guinea who became one of the world’s first black models; Alice Lenshina, who fought British colonial rule in Zambia and was considered a prophet in the Lumpa Church; Ellen Kuzwayo, member of the African National Congress whose struggle for civil and women’s rights landed her in prison; Dulcie September, the ANC representative in France, killed for her ardent support for the cause of freedom; Miriam Makeba, internationally loved singer South African singer; Winnie Mandela, who carried on the struggle during Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment; and many others.

 

 

 

Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Her parents were originally from Guadeloupe. Her father was a soldier while her mother was a teacher. When the Second World War broke out, her father stayed in France to fight, while she and her mother returned to Guadeloupe. She lived in a rather dilapidated school group with her mother. She studied at Pointe-à-Pitre, followed by Paris and Dakar. At the age of 18, while studying in Paris, she met her future husband, André Schwarz-Bart, who encouraged her to take up writing as a career. They married in 1960, and lived at various times in Senegal, Switzerland, Paris, and Guadeloupe. Schwarz-Bart at one time ran a Creole furniture business as well as a restaurant. Her husband died in 2006. They have two sons, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a noted jazz saxophonist, and Bernard Schwarz-Bart. She currently lives in Goyave, a small village in Guadeloupe. In 1967, together with her husband, André Schwarz-Bart, she wrote Un plat de porc aux bananas vertes, a historical novel exploring the parallels in the exiles of Caribbeans and Jews. In 1972, they published La Mulâtresse Solitude. In 1989, they wrote a six-volume encyclopaedia Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women), to honour the black heroines who were missing in the official historiography. Despite being mentioned as her husband's collaborator in their works, critics have often attributed full authorship to André Schwarz-Bart, and only his name appears in the French edition of La Mulâtresse Solitude. Her authorship is acknowledged, however, in the English translation of the book. In 1972, Schwarz-Bart wrote Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, which is considered one of the masterpieces of Caribbean literature. She wrote the book after the loss of a dear friend named Stéphanie whom she considered to be "her grandmother, her sister ..." For her "it was the country that went away with this person" In 1979, she published Ti jean l'horizon. Schwarz-Bart has also written for the theatre: Ton beau capitaine was a well-received play in one act. Schwarz-Bart, along with her husband, is deeply committed to political issues, and the issues faced by people, especially women, of colour. She has explored the languages and locations of her ancestry in her works, and examines male domination over women in the Caribbean, as well as themes of alienation in exile. In his novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, the aim is indeed to identify the process by which women become women. The famous sentence of Simone de Beauvoir, "we are not born a woman, we become it" will not have escaped you, but much more than a conceptual formula. Schwartz-Bart highlights this statement in his production by mentioning the genealogy of its literary staff. This evocation will constitute a database, understood like historical, in which is given to have elements characteristic of the West Indies woman. Schwarz-Bart attempts to rehabilitate female figures in this West Indies discourse by giving them a decisive place. She links to the heritage of feminism which is part of the West Indies reflection discourse which it projects as a social and historical reality which would legitimize the latter. The reintegration of women into the general historicity of the West Indies will have enabled the reader of Simone Schwarz-Bart to reposition women in the social relations of power, both subject to the colonial system and to that of compulsory "herocentrism". In this positioning, the woman shows herself to be humble, modest and courageous. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov have previously translated two works by French novelist Patrick Chamoiseau into English: SOLIBO MAGNIFICENT and TEXACO. They translated IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN with Stephanie Daval. Howard Dodson is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

 

 

 

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Squeeze Play by Paul Benjamin (pseudonym of Paul Auster). New York. 1982. Alpha/Omega Books. 0938764047. 220 pages. paperback. Cover design by John Levee.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

In the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Paul Benjamin's first novel, Squeeze Play, is a marvelously written story of intrigue, deception, and murder. Private investigator, Max Klein, tunnels through the New York world of sport, politics and academia on the trail of one of the most devilish mysteries in recent fiction. A stunning debut by a writer of immense talent. Paul Benjamin was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947. After graduating from Columbia University, he has worked variously as a merchant seaman, an interpreter, a ghost writer, and an insurance investigator. He is married, the father of one son, and lives in New York. The true first edition of this pseudonymous novel and an exceptionally uncommon book.

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1947 and received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University. He is the author of four books of poetry and one previous book of prose. His essays have appeared in numerous magazines. including The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, and Harper's, and his translations of French poetry have been published widely, both here and in England. Auster has been the recipient of a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant for poetry, a Columbia-PEN translation award, and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City and is the editor of The Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Once: Poems by Alice Walker. New York. 1968. Harcourt Brace & World. 81 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Robin Forbes.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

ONCE is no ordinary book of poems. Alice Walker is only twenty-four years old, but she has had an eventful life. It embarrasses her to be called ‘active' in the civil-rights movement. ‘Like many, I am guilty of not being active enough,' she explains. Yet her essay on the impact of the Movement won first prize over several hundred competitors in a contest sponsored by The American Scholar, and she and her husband now live in Mississippi. He is a civil-rights attorney and she is at work on a novel. As might be expected, a large section of these poems deals with the civil-rights conflicts in the South. They are angry and vivid poems that give the reader an urgent sense of being on the scene, of seeing the faces and hearing the voices of those involved. Miss Walker has also lived with the Bugandans and the Kikuyus in Uganda and Kenya, East Africa, and another large portion of the book contains poems that have come out of that experience. They are very different: full of grace and wit and yet have a strangely primitive force that at dines reminds one of paintings by Henri Rousseau. Alice Walker is an original, one to be watched for her poetry and fiction. Best of all, there is a deep humanity to her work that insures its lastingness.

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland among other works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Penguin Modern European Poets

The Penguin Modern European Poets series, a subseries of the Penguin Poet’s series, offered collections in verse translations of the work of significant poets of the 20th century. The series includes: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prevert, Quasmodo, Greek poets -Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, and Seferis, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gunter Grass, Vasko Popa, Sandor Weores, Ferenc Juhasz, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Holan, Anna Akhmatova, Gunnar Ekelof, Paul Celan, Amichai, Kovner, Sachs, Cesare Pavese, the Czech poets, Nezval, Bartusek, and Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Fernando Pessoa, and even Joseph Brodsky. The verse translations are by, among others, W. H. Auden, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Hamburger, Ted Hughes, J. B. Leishman, Christopher Middleton and David Wevill.

 

The first book in the Penguin Poet’s series was a collection of Tennyson’s work, published in 1941. The series went through a number of incarnations, with Jan Tschichold in 1948, with its light green borders, to the wallpaper-like designs of Schmoler in 1954. Facetti changed the look the of line once again in 1966 to feature a Helvetica font.

 

Tschichold had a particular design vision in mind for the Penguin Poet’s series and devoted himself to enforcing that vision. It has been said that if a designer or printer presumed to challenge him, he would exaggerate his German accent and pretend not to understand. Tschichold’s legacy has defined Penguin’s design ever since.

 

The series started in 1963 with Al Alvarez as the advisory editor. Alfred Alvarez (5 August 1929 – 23 September 2019) was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez. As the poetry editor and critic for The Observer, he introduced British readers to John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Zbigniew Herbert, and Miroslav Holub. Alvarez is probably best known for his study of suicide, The Savage God, and his friendship with Sylvia Plath. Al Alvarez died at the age of 90 from viral pneumonia.

 

 

The in-house editor for the series at Penguin was Nikos Stangos. Nikos Stangos (November 21 1936 - April 16 2004) was an editor and poet, and an influential figure in British art publishing. He was born in Athens, Greece in 1936, both parents of old Greek families. His friendship with the poet Nanos Valaōritēs led to connections with a number of British poets including Stephen Spender. In the 1960s he met the writer David Plante, and they became lifelong partners. After securing an editorial position at Penguin Books, he worked as an editor of the Penguin Modern Poets series, and as a co-editor, with Al Alvarez, of the Penguin Modern European Poets series. His translation of Yannis Ritsos’s poetry for the series provided many English readers exposure to this important Greek poet’s work for the first time. After Penguin’s acquisition by Pearson in 1974, Stangos moved to Thames and Hudson, where he became a director of the company, a position he held until his retirement in May 2003.

 

 

Books in the Penguin Modern European Poets series:

 

 

Akhmatova, Anna. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1969. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Richard McKane. Essay by Andrei Sinyavsky. 112 pages. paperback. D115. Front cover photo of Anna Akhmatova by Polyakova, Leningrad.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Anna Akhmatova, who died in 1966, was among this century's greatest Russian poets. Andrei Sinyavsky writes of her: 'From the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts - such is the range of Akhmatova's inspiration and voice.' Richard McKane's moving English translations do justice to a poet whose famous cycle, 'Requiem', was recognized as a fitting memorial to the sufferings of millions of Russians under Stalin.

  

 

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), one of twentieth-century Russia’s greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced.

 

 

 

 

 

Amichai, Yehuda. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421416. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated by Assia Gutmann and Harold Schimmel with the collaboration of Ted Hughes. With an introduction by Michael Hamburger. 96 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench, photo by Thomas Simmons.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Yehuda Amichai is one of Israel’s leading post-war writers, and his response to the land and its people reflects the feelings of many of his contemporaries. Yet, although he has lived there since the age of thirteen and has been actively involved in Arab-Israeli conflict, he has retained a European, individual sensibility. The freshness of his perception and the intimacy of his recollections come through vividly in these English translations of his poems.

 

 

Yehuda Amichai (3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew. Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s. (The Times, London, Oct. 2000). He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.

 

 

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Selected Poems: Apollinaire. Baltimore. 1970. Penguin Books. 0140420827. Penguin Modern European Poets Series. Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Oliver Bernard. 89 pages. paperback.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Guillaume Apollinaire was a friend and supporter of the Cubists. His own experimental poetic forms employ rhythms which dispense with punctuation and a style of typography derived from exercises on postcards sent from the front in the First World War. Yet he is also in France the last of the poets whose lines young people know by hearts. ‘He said that poetry is a power to transform even the dullest activities of the mind, to waken the consciousness to a more vivid awareness and to make everything more exciting and more fascinating. This is what he himself did’ – Sir Maurice Bowra.

 

 

Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire (Rome, 26 August 1880 - 9 November 1918, Paris) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917, used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I, he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.

 

 

 

Arp, Hans / Schwitters, Kurt / Klee, Paul. Three Painter-Poets: Arp/Schwitters/Klee - Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421734. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated and with an introduction by Harriet Watts. 160 pages. paperback. The cover shows a detail of ‘Filth and Greatest’, a collage by Kurt Schwitters.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Gleamt beseethe zigzags. / Drizzle-trees piss grimace flowers. / Spring waft torches flamingly. / Sprinkle bladders beefsuet (due to paper shortage). - Lines like these (from 'Wheyweight Silverleaf Blossoms' by Kurt Schwitters) inevitably command attention. If Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee never quite achieved by their poetry the recognition accorded to their visual art, yet it serves to remind us how far Europe has travelled since Michelangelo wrote sonnets. The poems in this volume offer an intriguing insight into the visual art of three pioneers of the Twentieth Century.

 

Jean Arp or Hans Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966) was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet, and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper. When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as ‘Hans’, and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as ‘Jean’. Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942, he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended. Arp's career was distinguished with many awards including the Grand Prize for sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, a sculpture prizes at the 1964 Pittsburgh International, the 1963 Grand Prix National des Arts, the 1964 Carnegie Prize, the 1965 Goethe Prize from the University of Hamburg, and then the Order of Merit with a Star of the German Republic. Arp and his first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, became French nationals in 1926. In the 1930s, they bought a piece of land in Clamart and built a house at the edge of a forest. Influenced by the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, Taeuber designed it. She died in Zürich in 1943. After living in Zürich, Arp was to make Meudon his primary residence again in 1946. Arp married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach (1902–1994), his long-time companion, in 1959. He died in 1966, in Basel, Switzerland. Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures. Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

 

 

Blok, Alexander. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421602. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian by John Stallworthy & Peter France. 143 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Though he inspired a generation of Russian poets, including Pasternak, Alexander Blok has yet to be widely recognized in the West. Torn between accepting the Revolution, with its attendant excesses, and betraying his ideals, he chose to stay in Russia until he died in 1921, although he was regarded with suspicion by both sides and suffered increasing disillusionment. This collection of poems from every stage of his life, jointly translated by a linguist and a poet, aims to introduce the English reader to the distinctive and influential voice of Alexander Blok.

 

 

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (28 November 1880 – 7 August 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet. Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would affect his early publications, later collected in the book Ante Lucem. In 1903 he married Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrei Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that made him famous, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). During the last period of his life, Blok emphasized political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910–21; Rodina, 1907–16; Skify, 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he had vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair. ‘I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me’, he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings. By 1921 Blok had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. He did not write any poetry for three years. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that his ‘faith in the wisdom of humanity’ had ended. He explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ Within a few days Blok became sick. His doctors requested that he be sent for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Gorky pleaded for a visa. On 29 May 1921, he wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: ‘Blok is Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death’. Blok received permission only on 10 August, after his death. Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Alexander Pushkin, the memory of whom he believed to be capable of uniting White and Soviet Russian factions.

 

 

Bobrowski, Johannes and Bienek, Horst. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421335. Translated from the German by Ruth & Matthew Mead. Penguin Modern European Poets series. 128 pages. paperback. The cover, designed by Sylvia Clench, shows: large detail, Horst Bienek; small detail, Johannes Bobrowski.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Both the poets included in this volume were born in East Germany and have experienced the desolation of exile. Bobrowski, whose international reputation was established by 1965 when he died, describes the essence of his homeland in language that is controlled, precise and stark. Bienek, the younger poet, is at present living in West Germany. His poetry, not previously published in England, probes the wounds inflicted by four years in a Russian prison camp.

  

 

Johannes Bobrowski was born in 1917 in Tilsit in East Prussia, and educated in Rastenburg, Konigsberg and at Humboldt University in Berlin. His first book of poetry was published in 1961 and quickly established his international reputation. He wrote four volumes of poetry, two novels, and several collections of short stories. A selection of these stories, DARKNESS AND A LITTLE LIGHT, was published by New Directions. Bobrowski died in East Berlin in 1965. Horst Bienek (May 7, 1930, Gleiwitz – December 7, 1990, Munich) was a German novelist. Born in Gleiwitz, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland), Bienek was forced to leave there in 1945, when Germans were expelled from Silesia. He resettled in the eastern part of Germany. For a time, he was a student of Bertolt Brecht. In 1951, he was arrested by NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of labour in Vorkuta, a gulag. When he was released as the result of an amnesty in 1955, he settled in West Germany. Bienek was the winner of numerous prizes, including the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1981. His best known work is the four-volume series of novels dealing with the prelude to World War II and the war itself, Gleiwitz, Eine oberschlesische Chronik in vier Romanen.

 

 

Brodsky, Joseph. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421645. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian & Introduced by George L. Kline. Foreword by W. H. Auden. 168 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench. Photo by J. Richard McGinnis.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Joseph Brodsky was one of the younger generation of Russian poets, though most of his poetry has never been published in Russia and he became an involuntary exile in the United States, having been officially ‘invited’ to leave the Soviet Union. He is not a ‘public’ poet, however, and does not deal in propaganda; his poetry is personal and meditative, infused with a deep sense of suffering and having close affinities with the English metaphysical poets. He is concerned with the realities of love and death, of separation and solitude, and with the ‘unity of poetry and life’ and their struggle against the ‘dead things.’ It is these factors that incensed the Soviet authorities against him; the fact that he is Jewish did not help matters. As W. H. Auden says in his Foreword, Brodsky is ‘a poet of the first order, a man of whom his country should be proud.’

 

Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) came to the United States in 1972, an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and serve as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 and 1992.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carmi, T. and Pagis, Dan. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1976. Penguin Books. 0140421564. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Introduction by M. L. Rosenthal. 142 pages. paperback. Cover design by Wendy Taylor.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - A survivor of a concentration camp, Dan Pagis possesses a vision which is essentially tragic. He is engaged with Israel's griefs and, while he is capable of a moving colloquial humanity, his work often exhibits an apocalyptic intensity. The poems of T. Carmi are less dramatic in tone but with reverberations far greater than they pretend. He has a natural preference for an indirect and lyrical method in which a tragic sense of history combines with a pervasive and passionate anticipation of discovery. These two poets of international reputation are accurate spokesmen for the modern mind, as well as for Israel's special and precarious position and for their own very individual natures.

  

 

Carmi (December 31, 1925 – November 20, 1994) was the literary pseudonym of Carmi Charney, an American-born Israeli poet. Carmi Charney was born in New York City. His father, Rabbi Bernard (Baruch) Charney, was the principal of Yeshiva of Central Queens, a Jewish day school. The family spoke Hebrew at home. Charney studied at Yeshiva University and Columbia University. In 1946, he worked with orphan children in France whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He moved to Israel in 1948, just before the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence. He died in 1994. The first initial T is the English equivalent of the Hebrew letter tet, which Carmi adopted as it is the first letter of his original family name as written in Hebrew. Carmi's books translated into English include Blemish and Dream (1951), There are no black Flowers (1953), The Brass Serpent (1961), Somebody Like You(1971), and At The Stone Of Losses (1983). He was also translator of Shakespeare to Hebrew. His translations include Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure For Measure, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello. He co-edited The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, together with Stanley Burnshaw and Ezra Spicehandler. His major critical work was as editor and translator of The Penguin book of Hebrew Verse, a chronological anthology that spans 3,000 years of written Hebrew poetry. He wrote the preface to a collection of Gabriel Preil's poems, Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems (1985). T. Carmi was also the pseudonymous co-author jointly with Shoshana Heyman, Kush (short for the acronym of Carmi ve(and) Shoshana - in hebr.) of the classic Israeli children's book Shmulikipod. A sick boy laments that he has no one for company but the donkeys on his pajamas. Relief comes in the form of a visit from a somewhat short-tempered hedgehog (Hebr. kipod) named Shmulik. Dan Pagis (October 16, 1930 – July 29, 1986) was an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor. He was born in R?d?u?i, Bukovina in Romania and imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped in 1944 and in 1946 arrived safely in Israel where he became a schoolteacher in a kibbutz. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he later taught Medieval Hebrew literature. His first published book of poetry was Sheon ha-Tsel (The Shadow Clock) in 1959. In 1970 he published a major work entitled Gilgul – which may be translated as Revolution, cycle, transformation, metamorphosis, metempsychosis, etc. Other poems include: Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, Testimony, Europe, Late, Autobiography, and Draft of a Reparations Agreement. Pagis knew many languages, and translated multiple works of literature. He died of cancer in Israel on July 29, 1986. Pagis's most widely cited poem is Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car.

 

 

Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1972. Penguin Books. 0140421467. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger & Christopher Middleton and With An Introduction by Michael Hamburger. 108 pages. paperback. Cover designed by Sylvia Clench. Photograph by Gisela Discher-Bezzel.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Celan saw his poems as ‘messages in a bottle’. They could be picked up or lost - the risk involved was as essential for him as the need to communicate. Although influenced by early Expressionism, Celan occupies an isolated position in German literature. His work is characterized by a sense of horror - a legacy of his experiences under the Nazis, - a belief that poetry must be open to the unexpected and unpredictable, and by • his search for a redefinition of reality. Celan’s poetic progression is conveyed by his use of images, not by argument, and the difficulty and paradox are couched in a unique purity of form and diction.

  

Paul Celan (November 23, 1920 – approximately April 20, 1970) was the most frequently used pseudonym of Paul Antschel, one of the major poets of the post-World War II era. Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernauti, Bukovina, then part of Romania (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son’s education in Hebrew at Safah Ivriah, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization in 1927. His mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. After his Bar Mitzvah in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and terminated his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostering support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem, titled Mother’s Day 1938 was an earnest, if sentimental, profession of love. In 1938, Celan travelled to Tours, France to study medicine (the newly-imposed Jewish quota in Romanian universities and the Anschluss precluded Bucharest and Vienna), but returned to Cernauti in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who later was among the French detainees who died at Birkenau. The Soviet occupation in June 1940 deprived Celan of any lingering illusions about Stalinism and Soviet Communism stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; the Soviets quickly imposed bureaucratic reforms on the university where he was studying Romance philology, and the Red Army brought deportations to Siberia, just as Nazi Germany and Romania brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour a year later. On arrival in July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies burned down the city’s six-hundred-year-old Great Synagogue. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and continued to write his own poetry, all the while being exposed to traditional Yiddish songs and culture. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books. The local mayor strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Accounts of his whereabouts on that evening vary, but it is certain that Celan was not with his parents when they were taken from their home on June 21 and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. Celan’s parents were taken across the Southern Bug and handed over to the Germans, where his father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour. Later on, after having himself been taken to the labour camps in the Old Kingdom, Celan would receive reports of his parents’ deaths earlier that year. Celan remained in these labour camps until February 1944, when the Red Army’s advance forced the Romanians to abandon them, whereupon he returned to Cernauti shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Early versions of Todesfuge were circulated at this time, a poem that clearly relied on accounts coming from the now-liberated camps in Poland. Friends from this period recall expression of immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death. Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet antisemitism, Celan left Soviet-occupied territory in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists — Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun, and Dolfi Trost —, and it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name. A version of Todesfuge appeared as Tangoul Mortii (‘Death Tango‘) in a Romanian translation of May 1947. The surrealist ferment of the time was such that additional remarks had to be published explaining that the dancing and musical performances of the poem were realities of the extermination camp life. Night and Fog, another poem from that era, includes a description of the Auschwitz Orchestra, an institution organized by the SS to assemble and play selections of German dances and popular songs. (The SS man interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for his film Shoah, who rehearsed the songs prisoners were made to sing in the death camp, remarked that no Jews taught the song survived. As Romanian autonomy became increasingly tenuous in the course of that year, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmann, who had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic city it once was, which had harboured the then-shattered Austro-Hungarian Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948, where he found a publisher for his first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen (‘Sand from the Urns’). His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernauti, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a Dutch chanteuse. She visited him twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951. In a published edition of these letters, near the end of the exchange, Celan seems to be entertaining an amorous interest in her. In 1952 Celan received an invitation to the semiannual meetings of Group 47. At a 1953 meeting he read his poem Todesfuge (‘Death Fugue’), a depiction of concentration camp life. His reading style, which was based on Hungarian folk poems, was off-putting to the German audience. His poetry was sharply criticized. When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the Group’s prize for her collection Die gestundete Zeit (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said ‘After the meeting, only six people remembered my name’. He was not invited again. In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, in Paris. He would send her many wonderful love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka’s correspondence with Milena Jesenska and Felice Bauer. They married on December 21, 1952 despite the opposition of her aristocratic family, and during the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters, including a very active exchange with Siegfried Lenz and his wife, Hanna. He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École Normale Supérieure. He was also a pen friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature. Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan’s sense of persecution increased after the widow of his friend the French-German poet Yvan Goll accused him of plagiarising her husband’s work. Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in late April 1970.

 

 

 

Ekelof, Gunnar. Selected Poems: Gunnar Ekelof. Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421386. Penguin Modern European Poets Series. Introduction by Goran Printz-Pahlson. Translated from the Swedish by W. H. Auden & Leif Sjoberg. 141 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench. Photograph by B. Danielsson.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Gunnar Ekelöf, Sweden’s most important contemporary poet, whose work expresses an obsessive involvement with oriental mysticism, attracted the attention of many leading European writers and critics. A selection from two of his finest books, THE TALE OF FATUMEH and DIWÄN OVER THE PRINCE OF EMGION, is presented here in English by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjoberg, who have also contributed a foreword to this volume.

  

 

Gunnar Ekelöf (Stockholm, 15 September 1907 - Sigtuna, 16 March 1968) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1968. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Introduction by Michael Hamburger. Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, Jerome Rothenberg & The Author. 96 pages. paperback. D112. Cover photo of Hans Magnus Enzensberger by Gisela Groenewald.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - This selection draws on Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s three published volumes and also includes a number of other poems. The poet is a German — although uniquely cosmopolitan in outlook and range of sympathies — who was shaped by the Second World War and who expresses an awareness of the ideology responsible for that war and of the breakdown which followed it. His social and moral criticism owes much to Marxism, yet is free from party allegiance. As direct and accessible as graffiti on a wall, his poems are the most striking to emerge from post-war Germany.

  

 

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER is a German author, poet, translator and editor. His books include LIGHTER THAN AIR MORAL POEMS (2000) and CIVIL WARS: FROM L.A. TO BOSNIA (1994). Enzensberger’s work has been translated into more than 40 languages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grass, Günter. Poems of Günter Grass. Middlesex. 1969. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger & Christopher Middleton. 88 pages. paperback. D106. Cover photo of Günter Grass by Hans Rama.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Günter Grass, famous as a novelist, is here presented as a poet in a selection from his three published volumes. Grass's belief that an artist, however committed he may be in life, should be only a jester in art, is admirably practised in these poems in which fantasy, ingenuity and humour are substitutes for didacticism, and no word, thing or idea is too sacrosanct to be played with. Even in the recent controversial political poems, which come close to blurring his division between life and art, Grass's tremendous zest and sensuous response are felt.

 

Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely regarded as Germany's most famous living writer. Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). In 1945, he came to West Germany as a homeless refugee, though in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood. Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism, and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy, which also includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted into a film, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy, upon awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature, noted him as a writer ‘whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history’.

 

 

 

Guillevic, Eugene. Guillevic: Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421580. Translated from the French & With an Introduction by Teo Savory. Penguin Modern European Poets series. 151 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Through the work of this prolific Breton poet we come close to the very heart of nature in all its rich complexity. Detached, Guillevic contemplates his subjects and waits for them to communicate with him. He is, as Teo Savory writes in her introduction, at once 'enjoyable and shocking, obtuse and aggravating, humane and inhuman. The world he has created is compulsive and remarkably easy to enter. And the admiration for his skill as an artist is international.'

  

 

Eugène Guillevic (August 5, 1907 Carnac – March 19, 1997 Paris) was one of the better known French poets of the second half of the 20th century. Professionally, he went under just the single name ‘Guillevic’. He was born in the rocky landscape and marine environment of Brittany. His father, a sailor, was a policeman and took him to Jeumont (Nord) in 1909, Saint-Jean-Brévelay (Morbihan) in 1912, and Ferrette (Haut-Rhin) in 1919. After a BA in mathematics, he was placed by the exams of 1926, in the Administration of Registration (Alsace, Ardennes). Appointed in 1935 to Paris as senior editor at the Directorate General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, he was assigned in 1942 to control the economy. He was from 1945 to 1947 in the Cabinets of Ministers Francis Billoux (National Economy) and Charles Tillon (Reconstruction). In 1947 after the ouster of Communist ministers, he returned to the Inspector General of Economics, where his work included studies of the economy and planning, until his retirement in 1967. He was a pre-war friend of Jean Follain, who introduced him to the ‘Sagesse’ group. Then he belonged to the ‘School of Rochefort’. He was a practicing Catholic for about thirty years. He became a communist sympathizer during the Spanish Civil War, and in 1942 joined the Communist Party when he joined with Paul Éluard, and participated in the publications of the underground press (Pierre Seghers, Jean Lescure).

 

 

Haavikko, Paavo and Tranströmer, Tomas. Selected Poems: Paavo Haavikko and Tomas Tranströmer. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421572. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Finnish by Anselm Hollo. Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton. 141 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - The 1950s saw a major breakthrough in Finnish poetry when such modernists as Paavo Haavikko turned away from national idealism. The poetry of Haavikko, who has emerged as the most original of these poets, is remarkable for its lyricism and exceptionally direct imagery. Tomas Tranströmer, a contemporary Swedish poet, draws on a long tradition of Swedish nature poetry, and combines a wide viewpoint with a sharp focus on particular details. This selection ranges from his early, somewhat mystical poems to his later, more explicit work.

 

  

Paavo Haavikko (January 25, 1931, Helsinki – October 6, 2008) was a Finnish poet and playwright, considered one of the country's most outstanding writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1984. From 1967 to 1983, he was literary director of the Otava publishing company, and from 1989 to his death owner of the Art House publishing company. Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. The author of a dozen books of poetry, TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER (April 15, 1931, Stockholm, Sweden - March 26, 2015, Stockholm, Sweden) was one of the most celebrated and influential poetic figures of his generation. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and educated at Södra Latin School and the University of Stockholm, where he received a degree in psychology. He began his psychology career in the early 1960s at a juvenile corrections institute in Sweden, and worked for several decades in the field. He is one of the world’s most translated poets, with books appearing in numerous editions in over fifty languages. In addition to his renown as a poet, Tranströmer was also a highly regarded amateur pianist and entomologist.

 

 

 

Herbert, Zbigniew. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1968. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott. Introduction by A. Alvarez. 140 pages. paperback. D104. Cover design by Alan Spain.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - No country has suffered more of the brutalities of Communism and Fascism than Poland. Yet Zbigniew Herbert, the most classical of its poets, is neither nationalist nor Catholic. He speaks for no party. Avant-garde in manner, but controlled, precise, and honest in thought, he stands aside from the chaos all around him, ironically bent on survival. His is the voice of sanity.

  

 

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT was born in Lwów, Poland in 1924. In his late teens he fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include SELECTED POEMS, REPORT FROM THE BESIEGED CITY AND OTHER POEMS, MR COGITO, STIIL LIFE WITH A BRIDLE, THE KING OF THE ANTS, LABYRINTH ON THE SEA, and THE COLLECTED POEMS. He died in 1998.

 

 

 

 

Holan, Vladimir. Vladimir Holan: Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421343. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Czech by Jarmila & Ian Milner. 127 pages. paperback.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Vladimir Holan is now regarded in Czechoslovakia as one of the most outstanding living poets. Yet from 1948 until 1963 official disapproval of his poetry forced him to live in isolation. Those grim years inspired his finest work: he developed themes of man’s suffering, his lost innocence and the frustration of life in a world of ambiguities. Originally influenced by surrealism, he makes use of the juxtaposition of unexpected images to evoke in the reader his own sense of the strangeness of human existence.

  

Vladimír Holan (September 16, 1905 – March 31, 1980) was a Czech poet famous for employing obscure language, dark topics and pessimistic views in his poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the late 1960s. He was (1945 - 1950) a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Holan was born in Prague, but he spent most of his childhood outside the capital. When he moved back in the 1920s he studied law and started a job as a clerk, a position that was a large source of dissatisfaction for the poet. He lost his father and in 1932 married Věra Pilařová. In the same year he published the collection of poems Vanutí (Breezing), which he considered his first piece of poetic art (there were two books preceding it: Blouznivý vějíř /1926/ and Triumf smrti /1930/). It was his only collection to be reviewed by the knight of Czech critics, František Xaver Šalda, who compared Holan favorably with the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In the 1930s Holan continued writing obscure lyrical poetry and slowly started to express his political feelings (reacting to the Spanish Civil War at first). Political poems Odpověď Francii (The Reply to France), Září 1938 (September 1938) and Zpěv tříkrálový (Twelfth Night Song) were reactions to the situation in Czechoslovakia from September 1938 till March 1939. They also made him more intelligible and popular. The poem called Sen (The Dream) is a presage of a cruel war (amazingly published in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in April 1939). During the war he published several poetic stories in verse inspired by national humiliation. After the war he published an apocalyptic record of events in his Panychida and chanted about the Red Army in Tobě (To You), Rudoarmějci (Red Army Soldiers) and Dík Sovětskému svazu (Thanks to the Soviet Union). He left the Catholic Church and became a member of the Communist Party. In 1949 after the communist takeover he was involved in an incident against Soviet influence in the new regime and his work was on the index of Czech literature. He left the Communist Party and reentered the Catholic Church. In the last years of his life he lived in reclusive poverty in the very heart of Prague on the island of Kampa. In the 1950s and 1960s he wrote longer poems mixing reality and lyrical abstraction. He is best known in English for his postwar works, both the often teasingly obscure longer poem Noc s Hamletem (A Night with Hamlet, 1964) which became the most often translated Czech poem, and his short, gnomic lyrical reflections, with occasional submerged notes of political protest. He became a legendary poet-recluse. He had a daughter, Kateřina, born in 1949 in his bad years and in addition to the social problems she suffered from Down syndrome (he wrote a poem called Bajaja for her, which with Jaroslav Seifert's Maminka, is one of the basic children's poetry works of Czech modern literature - also illustrated by Jiří Trnka. When she died in 1977, Holan lost his will to live and ceased writing. He died in a flat in Prague's riverfront Kampa district in 1980 and was buried in Olšany Cemetery.

 

 

Holub, Miroslav. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1967. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Introduction by A. Alvarez. Translated from the Czech by Ian Milner & George Theiner. 101 pages. paperback. D95. Cover design by Harriet Walters based on a microphotograph by Professor P. Bassot.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Miroslav Holub would like people to ‘read poems as naturally as they read the papers, or go to a football match. Not to consider it as anything more difficult, or effeminate, or praiseworthy.’ Holub, an internationally distinguished scientist, is Czechoslovakia’s most lively and experimental poet. The scientist in him is always creatively present in his poems, lurking behind his restless experiments in free verse and his constant probing below the obvious surface of things. Above all he shows an unwavering sense of the realities of life.

 

Miroslav Holub (13 September 1923 – 14 July 1998) was a Czech poet and immunologist. Miroslav Holub's work was heavily influenced by his experiences as an Immunologist, writing many poems using his scientific knowledge to poetic effect. His work is almost always unrhymed, so lends itself easily to translation. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and is especially popular in the English-speaking world. Although one of the most internationally well-known Czech poets, his reputation continues to languish at home. Holub was born in Plzen. His first book in Czech was Denní služba (1958), which abandoned the somewhat Stalinist bent of poems earlier in the decade (published in magazines). In English, he was first published in the Observer in 1962, and five years later a Selected Poems appeared in the Penguin Modern European Poets imprint, with an introduction by Al Alvarez and translations by Ian Milner and George Theiner. Holub's work was lauded by many, including Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and his influence is visible in Hughes' collection Crow (1970). In addition to poetry, Holub wrote many short essays on various aspects of science, particularly biology and medicine (specifically immunology) and life. A collection of these, titled The Dimension of the Present Moment, is still in print. In the 1960s, he published two books of what he called 'semi-reportage' about extended visits to the United States. He has been described by Ted Hughes as ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.’

 

 

Jimemez, Juan Ramon and Machado, Antonio. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421718. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Spanish by J. B. Trend and J. L. Gili with an introduction by J. B. Trend (Jimenez). Translated from the Spanish by Charles Tomlinson and Henry Gifford with an introduction by Henry Gifford (Machado). 135 pages. paperback. D171. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - The two Spanish poets whose work is represented in this volume were born in 1875 and 1881: both were Andalusians and both ‘adopted’ Castile. Both evolved, too, out of the modernist movement of the late nineteenth century and came to occupy central positions in the Spanish poetry of this century. Each in his way strove to speak more directly through poetry, abandoning rhyme for the traditional Spanish assonance and experimenting in free verse. And finally both these two friends (like so many artists and painters) were forced to leave the Spain they loved at the time of the Civil War.

 

Juan Ramón Jiménez - Nobel Prize winner - was born in Moguer, Andalucia in 1881, and is considered to be a central figure in contemporary Spanish poetry. The successor of Ruben Dario in the development of modernism, his work shows many French influences, and he has been the greatest poetical influence in that brilliant school of modern Spanish poetry of which F. Garcia Lorca was one of the younger members. There is nothing in Jiménez of the conventional Audalusian ‘20 pose known as Popularismo, so important in the poetry of some of his contemporaries, though he is no less fundamentally Spanish. He lived his later years in the U.S.A. and Puerto Rico and died in 1958. Antonio Machado died in 1939 at the age of sixty-four. As a boy he went to school in Madrid, became involved in its literary life in the 1890s and published some satirical comments on the social and literary scene in 1893. On a visit to Paris in 1899 he met Oscar Wilde and Moréas. A teacher of French by profession, he married his landlady’s daughter in 1909, and his personal happiness coupled with a new concern for Spanish problems helped to liberate his poetry from its early tristesse. His wife, however, died tragically in 1912 and Machado became increasingly melancholic with an ironic, cryptic note creeping into his poetry. A staunch Republican at the time of the Civil War, he died in exile in France.

 

 

 

Keeley, Edmund and Sherrard, Philip (editors & translators). Four Greek Poets: C.P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Nikos Gatsos. Middlesex. 1970. Penguin Books. 0140420916. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Includes Work by - C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, & Nikos Gatsos. Translated from the Greek & Edited by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. 110 pages. paperback. Cover design by Alan Spain.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, Seferis – Of the four Greek authors represented in this volume, Cavafy and Seferis are poets with international reputations and Seferis has won a Nobel Prize. Elytis and Gatsos, who belong to a younger generation, are fully established in Greece and now winning recognition abroad.

 

CONSTANTINE PETROU CAVAFY, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

 

GEORGE SEFERIS (the nom de plume of George Seferiades) was born in Smyrna in 1900, and moved to Athens with his family when he was fourteen. He studied in Paris at the end of the First World War and afterward joined the Greek diplomatic service. From 1957 to 1962 he lived in London as Ambassador of Greece to the Court of St. James’s. His first collection of poetry, TURNING POINT, was published in 1931. Since then he has published several other collections of both poetry and essays, which have been translated into many languages, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Cambridge (1960), Thessalonika (1964) and Oxford (1964).

 

ODYSSEUS ELYTIS was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911. He studied law at the University of Athens. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1935; since the publication of his first book of poems in 1940, ten further volumes of his poetry have appeared. He has also published three collections of essays, and translations from a wide range of modern writers including Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Ungaretti and Brecht. In 1940-1 he took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania. During the Nazi occupation he was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance. He lived in Paris from 1948-52; since then his home has been in Athens. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him 'for his poetry which against the background of Greek tradition depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.’

 

NIKOS GATSOS (8 December 1911 – 12 May 1992) was a Greek poet, translator and lyricist. Nikos Gatsos was born in 1911 in Asea in Arcadia, a district of the Peloponnese, where he finished primary school (dimotiko). He attended high school (gymnasio) in Tripoli, where he became acquainted with literature and foreign languages. Afterwards, he moved to Athens, where he studied literature, philosophy, and history at the University of Athens for two years only. His knowledge of English and French was quite good and he was already familiar with Kostis Palamas, Dionysios Solomos, Greek folk songs, and recent trends in European poetry. In Athens, he came in contact with the literary circles of the day becoming one of the lifelong friends of fellow poet Odysseus Elytis and published his poems, small in extent and in a classic style, in the magazines Nea Estia (1931–32) and Rythmos (1933). During that period he also published criticism. In 1935 he lived in France, in Paris and the South of France. In 1936 he met Odysseus Elytis, his ‘brother’ in poetry. In 1943, Aetos published his long poem Amorgos, a major contribution to contemporary Greek poetry notable especially for its combination of surrealism with traditional Greek folk poetry motifs. He subsequently published three more poems: ‘Elegeio’ (1946) in Filologika Chronika, ‘The Knight and Death’ (1947), and ‘Song of Old Times’ (1963), dedicated to Yorgos Seferis, in Tachydromos magazine. After World War II, he worked with the Greek-British Review as a translator and with Ellinikí Radiofonía as a radio director. During that period he also began writing lyrics for the music of Manos Hadjidakis, opening a brilliant career in modern Greek songwriting. In due course he also collaborated with Mikis Theodorakis and other notable composers. His work as a whole combines universal poetic themes such as the problems of evil, injustice, sacrifice, and the pains of love, with more specifically Greek concerns such as the sorrows of exile. His capability to handle language with accuracy led the ‘Art Theatre’, the ‘National Theatre’ and the ‘Popular Theatre’ of Greece to entrust him with translations of various plays -translations that became ‘legendary’- first and foremost being ‘Blood Wedding’ by Federico Garcia Lorca. He had a special relationship with Manos Hadjidakis and Nana Mouskouri. His British friends were Philip Sherrard, Peter Levi and Peter Jay, and his Irish friend, Desmond O'Grady. He died in Athens on 12 May 1992. Nikos Gatsos devoted considerable time to translating plays from various languages in Greek, mainly for the Greek National Theatre, the Greek Theatre of Art, and the Greek Popular Theatre. In 1944, he translated (for Filologika Chronika) the poem ‘Night song’ by Federico García Lorca. All of the plays he translated were staged at the Greek National Theatre and the Greek Theatre of Art. He also associated with the magazines Nea Estia, Tram,Makedonikes Imeres, Mikro Tetradio, Nea Grammata, Filologika Chronika, and Kallitechnika Nea. In addition, he directed plays during his association with Greek radio. Nikos Gatsos played a great role, as a poet, in Greek song. He wrote lyrics for major Greek composers, including Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, Stavros Xarchakos, Demos Moutsis, Loukianos Kelaidonis, Christodoulos Chalaris and Eleni Karaindrou. He wrote lyrics for several films and for the Elia Kazan's ‘America-America’. His lyrics are known over the world because of Nana Mouskouri. His lyrics are collected in the book Ola ta tragoudia (Patakis, 1999).

 

EDMUND KEELEY is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. He has translated several of the leading modem Greek poets, often in collaboration with Philip Sherrard (the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis, a selection of Angelus Sikelianos). His translations of Yannis Ritsos, Ritsos in Parentheses, appeared in 1979.

 

 

 

 

PHILIP OWEN ARNOULD SHERRARD (23 September 1922 – 30 May 1995) was a British author, translator and philosopher. His work includes important translations of Modern Greek poets, and books on Modern Greek literature and culture, metaphysics, theology, art and aesthetics. A pioneer of Modern Greek studies in England, he was influential in making major Greek poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries known in the English-speaking world. He was also a prolific writer on theological and philosophical themes, addressing the origins of the social and spiritual crisis he believed was occurring in the developed world, and specifically exploring modern attitudes towards the environment from a Christian perspective.

 

 

 

 

Kovner, Abba / Sachs, Nelly. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421378. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Hebrew by Shirley Kaufman & Nurit Orchan (Kovner). Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger and Others (Sachs). Selected with an Introduction by Stephen Spender. 123 pages. paperback. The cover, designed by Sylvia Clench, show: large detail, Nelly Sachs; small detail, Abba Kovner.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - From the Jewish tradition of suffering and the holocaust Abba Kovner and Nelly Sachs draw their different inspirations. The poetry of Abba Kovner, written in Hebrew and translated here for the first time into English, reflects his entirely Jewish background, while the work of the Nobel prize-winner Nelly Sachs, who writes in German, displays close links with modern European poetry. Stephen Spender introduces this collection with a major essay on the contrasted poetic treatment of violence and suffering in the Western and the Hebrew traditions.

 

Abba Kovner (March 14, 1918 – September 25, 1987) was a Jewish Hebrew poet, writer and partisan leader. He became one of the great poets of modern Israel. He was a cousin of the Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner.

Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891 – 12 May 1970) was a Jewish German poet and playwright whose experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokeswoman for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems 'Zeichen im Sand' (1962), 'Verzauberung' (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971).

 

 

Mandelstam, Osip. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1977. Penguin Books. 0140421912. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. 139 pages. paperback. Cover design by Wendy Taylor.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Osip Mandelstam, born in 1891, was one of the great Russian poets who, like his friends Pasternak and Akhmatova, bore witness to the plight of Russia under Stalin. For this he paid with his life, dying in the winter of 1938 on his way to a Siberian labour camp. Apart from his genius, the first miracle of Mandelstam's poetry – suppressed in Russia for some forty years - is that it has survived. Though the poems reflect his life and its horror, they are by no means all of them grim. In his introduction Clarence Brown describes the 'incorrigible delight' which Mandelstam took in his art. His commitment to poetry was total, and he felt acutely that his gift imposed upon him an obligation: the people, he believed, need poetry no less than bread.

 

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (15 January 1891 – 27 December 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Montale, Eugenio. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1969. Penguin Books. 0140420991. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Italian by George Kay. 126 pages. paperback.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Since the publication of Ossi di Seppia, his first volume of poems, in 1925, Eugenio Montale has come to be seen in Italy as ‘the poet’ of this century. His reputation is now international. Truth is the only star Montale has followed. Leaning neither to the right nor the left, favouring neither the Catholic church nor the Communist party, he has stood on his own and kept his perception completely clear. His poetry can be difficult, even obscure; but frequently it reflects life in a strong, musical diction which has been compared to that of T.S. Eliot.

 

Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896 – September 12, 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. He is widely considered the greatest Italian lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi. Montale was born in Genoa. His family were chemical products traders (his father furnished Italo Svevo's firm). The poet's niece, Bianca Montale, in her Cronaca famigliare (‘Family Chronicle’) of 1986 portrays the family's common characteristics as ‘nervous fragility, shyness, concision in speaking, a tendency to see the worst in every event, a certain sense of humour’. Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled: ‘We had a large family. My brothers went to the scagno [‘office’ in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had not such a possibility. In many families the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task to keep up the family's name.’ In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant, but was left free to follow his literary passion, frequenting the city's libraries and attending his sister Marianna's private philosophy lessons. He also studied opera singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. Montale was therefore a self-taught man. Growing up, his imagination was caught by several writers, including Dante Alighieri, and by studies of foreign languages (especially English), as well as the landscapes of the Levante (‘Eastern’) Liguria, where he spent holidays with his family. During World War I, as a member of the Military Academy of Parma, Montale asked to be sent to the front. After a brief war experience as an infantry officer in Vallarsa and the Puster Valley, in 1920 he came back home. Montale wrote more that ten anthologies of short lyrics, a journal of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two books of literary criticism, and one of fantasy prose. Alongside his imaginative work he was a constant contributor to Italy's most important newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote a huge amount of articles on literature, music, and art. He also did write a foreword for Dante's ‘The Divine Comedy’ or ‘La Comedia Divina’. In his foreword he mentions the credibility of Dante, and his insight and unbiased imagination. Montale's work, especially in his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia (‘Cuttlefish Bones’), which appeared in 1925: as an antifascist, he felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature. The Mediterranean landscape of Montale's native Liguria was a strong presence in these early poems: they gave him a sort of ‘personal reclusion’ in face of the depressing events around him. These poems emphasise his personal solitude and empathy with the ‘little’ and ‘insignificant’ things around him, or with its horizon, the sea. According to Montale, nature is ‘rough, scanty, dazzling’. In a world filled with defeat and despair, nature alone seemed to possess dignity, the same that the reader experiences in reading his poems. Montale moved to Florence in 1927 to work as editor for the publisher Bemporad. Florence was the cradle of the Italian poetry of that age, with works like the Canti orfici by Dino Campana (1914) and the first lyrics by Ungaretti for the review Lacerba. Other poets like Umberto Saba and Vincenzo Cardarelli had been highly praised by the Florentine publishers. In 1929 Montale was asked to be chairman of the Gabinetto Vieusseux Library, a post from which he was expelled in 1938 by the fascist government. In the meantime he collaborated to the magazine Solaria, and (starting in 1927) frequented the literary café Le Giubbe Rosse (‘Red Jackets’) on the Piazza Vittoria (now Piazza della Repubblica). Visiting often several times a day, he became a central figure among a group of writers there, including Carlo Emilio Gadda, Arturo Loria and Elio Vittorini (all founders of the magazine). He wrote for almost all the important literary magazines of the time. Though hindered by financial problems and the literary and social conformism imposed by the authorities, Montale published in Florence his finest anthology, Le occasioni (‘Occasions’, 1939). From 1933 to 1938 he had a deep relationship with Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Dante who occasionally visited Italy in short stints before returning to the United States. After falling in love with Brandeis, Montale represented her as a mediatrix figure like Dante's Beatrice. Le occasioni contains numerous allusions to Brandeis, here called Clizia (a senhal). Franco Fortini judged Montale's Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni the highest point of 20th century Italian poetry. T.S. Eliot, who shared Montale's admiration for Dante, was an important influence on his poetry at this time; in fact, the new poems of Eliot were shown to Montale by Mario Praz, then teaching in Liverpool. The concept of the objective correlative used by Montale in his poetry, was probably influenced by T. S. Eliot. In 1948, for Eliot's sixtieth birthday, Montale contributed a celebratory essay entitled ‘Eliot and Ourselves’ to a biblio-symposium published to mark the occasion. From 1948 to his death, Montale lived in Milan. As a contributor to the Corriere della Sera he was music editor and reported from abroad, including Palestine, where he went as a reporter to follow Pope Paul VI's voyage there. His works as a journalist are collected in Fuori di casa (‘Out of Home’, 1969). La bufera e altro (‘The Storm and Other Things’) was published in 1956 and marks the end of Montale's most acclaimed poetry. Here his figure Clizia is joined by La Volpe (‘the Fox’), based on the young poetess Maria Luisa Spaziani with whom Montale had an affair during the 1950s. However, this volume also features Clizia, treated in a variety of poems, as a kind of bird-goddess who defies Hitler. They are some of his greatest works. His later works are Xenia (1966), Satura (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973). Montale's later poetry is wry and ironic, musing on the critical reaction to his earlier works and on the constantly changing world around him. Satura contains a poignant elegy to his wife Drusilla Tanzi. He also wrote a series of poignant poems about Clizia shortly before his death. Montale's fame at that point had extended throughout the world. He had received honorary degrees by the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge (1967), Rome (1974), and had been named Senator-for-Life in the Italian Senate. In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Milan in 1981. In 1996, a work appeared called Posthumous Diary (Diario postumo) that purported to have been 'constructed' by Montale before his death with the help of the young poet Annalisa Cima; the critic Dante Isella thinks that this work is not authentic. Joseph Brodsky dedicated his essay ‘In the Shadow of Dante’ to Eugenio Montale's lyric poetry.

 

 

Nezval, Vitezslav / Bartusek, Antonin / Hanzlik, Josef. Three Czech Poets: Vitezslav Nezval/ Antonin Bartusek/Josef Hanzlik. Middlesex. 1971. Penguin. 0140421300. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers and George Theiner. Introduction by Graham Martin. 158 pages. paperback. The cover designed by Slyvia Clench, shows: large detail, Vitezslav Nezval; above, Antonin Bartusek; below, Josef Hanzlik (photographs Dilla, Prague).

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - This volume represents three generations of Czech poetry. Vitezslav Nezval (born in 1900) adopted surrealism to express the paradoxes of experience, above all in his briefer impressions of Prague. Antonin Bartusek (1921), like Eliot (whose influence he admits), is a master of suggestion: there are hints of greatness in his language and rhythms, in his concern with life and death. With Josef Hanzlik (1938) we enter the contemporary world: here is a poet who, freshly and fluently, records his response to a world of political violence.

 

VITEZSLAV NEZVAL (1900-1958) was the most colourful and versatile of Czech poets between the two wars. He was associated in his early work with the French Dadaists, and was an exponent of 'poetism', but the poetry of his later years gravitated increasingly towards traditional forms. His principle volumes of poetry are: The Bridge (1922), Pantomime (1924), The Lesser Rose Garden (1926), Acrobat (1927), Night Poems (1930), Dice (193o), The Glass Cape (1933), Return Ticket (1933), Farewell and a Handkerchief (1934), Woman in the Plural (1936), Prague with Fingers of Rain (1936), The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), Mother Hope (1938), Historical Picture (1939), Five Minutes Behind the City (1940), Song of Peace (i95o), From Home (1951), Wings (1952), Cornflowers and Towns (1955), Unfinished (1960, posthumously). He has also published, anonymously, 52 Bitter Ballads of the Perpetual Student Robert David (5936), too Sonnets for the Girl who Saved the Perpetual Student Robert David (1937), and 70 Poems from the Underworld as a Farewell to the shade of the Perpetual Student Robert David (1938). Nezval also attempted a novel, wrote three plays, and translated Rimbaud, Pushkin, Heine and Pablo Neruda.

ANTONIN BARTUSEK was born in 1925 in Zeltava, Western Moravia, and studied at Charles University, Prague. He now works at the State Office for Historical Monuments. His volumes of poetry arc: Fragments (1945), Destiny (1947) and then, following a prolonged silence during the period of Stalinism, Oxymoron (1965) and the existentialist Red Strawberries (1967), and more recently Dance of the Emu Bird and Antistar (1969) and Royal Progress (1970). He has translated American, French and German poetry and is the author of essays in the field of art history, scenography and literary criticism.

JOSEF HANZLIK, lyrical poet and translator, was born in 1938 at Neratovice near Prague and studied psychology at Charles University. He was poetry editor of Plamen, the literary monthly of the Writer's Union, until its suspension in 1969. One of the most striking personalities among the younger generation of poets, he has had a great influence on young people. His books of poetry are: The Lamp (1961), Erratic Block (1962), Silver Eyes (1963), Paris Hinterland (1963), Black Roundabout (1964), Anguish (1967), and Three Cheers for Herod (1967). His latest work is Euphoria Land. He has also written several children's books and translated Russian, American and Yugoslav poetry.

 

 

Pavese, Cesare. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421351. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Italian, Edited, & With A Foreword by Margaret Crosland. 144 pages. paperback. Cover drawing by Lucia Severino.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Cesare Pavese committed suicide in 1950, at the height of his literary career. Famous as a novelist, he will also be remembered for his sympathetic poetry, which evokes traditional, timeless Italian life and expresses profound disquiet at the encroachment of soulless urbanization. This collection illustrates his deepening preoccupation with man's isolation and includes two of his most important essays on poetry.

 

Cesare Pavese (9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator; he is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country. Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style was devoid of all rhetoric. As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public. Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into ‘confino’, internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there. Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato.He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio. Pavese gave her the American edition of SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, which came out in Pivano's Italian translation in 1943.After the war Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità. The bulk of his work was published during this time. Toward the end of his life, he would frequently visit Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel was dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates in 1950. That year he had won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline'(1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949). Leslie Fiedler wrote of Pavese's death ‘. .for the Italians, his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us, a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age.’ The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, mimic the last scene of Tra Donne Sole (AMONG WOMEN ONLY), his penultimate book. His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES by Louise Sinclair in 1952.

 

 

 

Pessoa, Fernando. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421610. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin. 128 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - This volumes in a sense the work of four poets, for Fernando Pessoa adopted in his writing four separate personas. Though he led an uneventful life, his poetry reveals a mind shaken by intensive inner suffering. Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis helped to set him free by hiving off three great swarms of thought and feeling’: each a separate poet, they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa’s poets and poetry all contribute to the ‘mysterious importance of existence’.

 

Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa (June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Popa, Vasko. Selected Poems: Vasko Popa. Middlesex. 1969. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Introduction by Ted Hughes. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Anne Pennington. 124 pages. paperback. D114. The cover shows a drawing of Vasko Popa by Mario Mascarelli, Belgrade.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - This is the first collection of poems by Vasko Popa, a leading Yugoslav poet, to appear in English translation. His arrangement of poems in cycles, together with his rich poetic imagination and an extreme concentration of language give a special character to Popa’s work. His international standing was recently confirmed by the award of the Austrian Lenau prize for literature. Penguin Modern European Poets is designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of this century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series already includes Yevtushenko, Rilke, Apollinaire, Prevert, Quasimodo, a volume of Greek poets, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Gunter Grass.

 

Vasko Popa (June 29, 1922 - January 5, 1991) was a Serbian poet of Romanian descent. Popa was born in the village of Grebenac, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia). After finishing high school, he enrolled as a student of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He continued his studies at the University of Bucharest and in Vienna. During World War II, he fought as a partisan and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp in Beckerek (today Zrenjanin, Serbia). After the war, in 1949, Popa graduated from the Romanic group of the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. He published his first poems in the magazines Književne novine (Literary Magazine) and the daily Borba (Struggle). From 1954 until 1979 he was the editor of the publishing house Nolit. In 1953 he published his first major verse collection, Kora (Bark). His other important work included Nepocin-polje (No-Rest Field, 1956), Sporedno nebo (Secondary Heaven, 1968), Uspravna zemlja (Earth Erect, 1972), Vucja so (Wolf Salt, 1975), and Od zlata jabuka (Apple of Gold, 1978), an anthology of Serbian folk literature. His Collected Poems, 1943–1976, a compilation in English translation, appeared in 1978, with an introduction by the British poet Ted Hughes. On May 29, 1972 Vasko Popa founded The Literary Municipality Vršac and originated a library of postcards, called Slobodno lišce (Free Leaves). In the same year, he was elected to become a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Vasko Popa is one of the founders of Vojvodina Academy of Sciences and Arts, established on December 14, 1979 in Novi Sad. He is the first laureate of the Branko’s award (Brankova nagrada) for poetry, established in honour of the poet Branko Radicevic. In the year 1957 Popa received another award for poetry, Zmaj’s Award (Zmajeva nagrada), which honours the poet Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj. In 1965 Popa received the Austrian state award for European literature. In 1976 he received the Branko Miljkovic poetry award, in 1978 the Yugoslav state AVNOJ Award, and in 1983 the literary award Skender Kulenovic. In 1995, the town of Vršac established a poetry award named after Vasko Popa. It is awarded annually for the best book of poetry published in Serbian language. The award ceremony is held on the day of Popa’s birthday, 29 June. Vasko Popa died on January 5, 1991 in Belgrade and is buried in the Aisle of the Deserving Citizens in Belgrade’s New Cemetery. Vasko Popa wrote in a succinct modernist style that owed much to surrealism and Serbian folk traditions (via the influence of Serbian poet Momcilo Nastasijevic) and absolutely nothing to the Socialist Realism that dominated Eastern European literature after World War II; in fact, he was the first in post-World War II Yugoslavia to break with the Socialist Realism. He created a unique poetic language, mostly elliptical, that combines a modern form, often expressed through colloquial speech and common idioms and phrases, with old, oral folk traditions of Serbia – epic and lyric poems, stories, myths, riddles, etc. In his work, earthly and legendary motifs mix, myths come to surface from the collective subconscious, the inheritance and everyday are in constant interplay, and the abstract is reflected in the specific and concrete, forming a unique and extraordinary poetic dialectics.In The New York Times obituary, the author mentions that the English poet Ted Hughes lauded Popa as an ‘epic poet’ with a ‘vast vision’. The author also mentions that in his introduction to ‘Vasko Popa: Collected Poems 1943-1976,’ translated by Anne Pennington Hughes says: ‘As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a universe passing through a universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.’ Since his first book of verse, Kora (Bark), Vasko Popa has gained steadily in stature and popularity. His poetic achievement - eight volumes of verse written over a period of thirty eight years - has received extensive critical acclaim both in his native land and beyond. He is one of the most translated Serbian poets and at the time he had become one of the most influential World poets.

 

 

Prevert, Jacques. Selections From Paroles. Middlesex. 1965. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the French & With an Introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 139 pages. paperback. D84. Cover photograph by Chris Marker.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Jacques Prevert is a contemporary master of the plain but telling word. PAROLES is his central work. This selection with translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti shows both Prevert’s violently anarchic moods and the lyricism that makes him a poet of the people.

 

Jacques Prévert (4 February 1900 – 11 April 1977) was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). Prévert was born at Neuilly-sur-Seine and grew up in Paris. After receiving his Certificat d'études upon completing his primary education, he quit school and went to work in Le Bon Marché, a major department store in Paris. He was called up for military service in 1918. After the war, he was sent to the Near East to defend French interests there. He died in Omonville-la-Petite, on 11 April 1977. He had been working on the last scene of the animated movie Le Roi et l'oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) with his friend and collaborator Paul Grimault. When the film was released in 1980, it was dedicated to Prévert's memory, and on opening night, Grimault kept the seat next to him empty. At first when Prévert was attending primary school, he hated writing. Prévert participated actively in the Surrealist movement. Together with the writer Raymond Queneau and artist Marcel Duchamp, he was a member of the Rue du Château group. He was also a member of the agitprop Groupe Octobre. Prévert's poems were collected and published in his books: Paroles (Words) (1946), Spectacle (1951), La Pluie et le beau temps (Rain and Good Weather) (1955), Histoires (Stories) (1963), Fatras (1971) and Choses et autres (Things and Others) (1973). His poems are often about life in Paris and life after the Second World War. They are widely taught in schools in France and frequently appear in French language textbooks published worldwide. They are also often taught in American upper level french classes (French 2 in Kansas) to learn basics, such as Dejeuner du Matin. Some of Prévert's poems, such as 'Les Feuilles mortes' (Autumn Leaves), 'La grasse matinée' (Sleeping in), 'Les bruits de la nuit' (The sounds of the night), and 'Chasse à l'enfant' (The hunt for the child) were set to music by Joseph Kosma—and in some cases by Germaine Tailleferre of Les Six, Christiane Verger, and Hanns Eisler. They have been sung by prominent French vocalists, including Marianne Oswald, Yves Montand, and Édith Piaf, as well as by the later American singers Joan Baez and Nat King Cole. In 1961, French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg paid tribute to 'Les feuilles mortes' in his own song 'La chanson de Prévert.' More recently, the British remix DJs Coldcut released their own version in 1993. A German version has been published and covered by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser), which he named 'Das welke Laub'. 'Les feuilles mortes' also bookends Iggy Pop's 2009 album, Préliminaires. Prévert's poems, are translated into various languages worldwide. Many translators have translated his poems into English. In Nepali, poet and translator Suman Pokhrel has translated some of his poems. Prévert wrote a number of screenplays for the film director Marcel Carné. Among them were the scripts for Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937), Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939), Les Visiteurs du soir (The Night Visitors, 1942) and Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945). The last of these regularly gains a high placing in lists of best films ever. His poems were the basis for a film by the director and documentarian Joris Ivens, The Seine Meets Paris (La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957), about the River Seine. The poem was read as narration during the film by singer Serge Reggiani. In 2007, a filmed adaptation of Prévert's poem, 'To Paint the Portrait of a Bird,' was directed by Seamus McNally, featuring T.D. White and Antoine Ray- English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Prévert had a long working relationship with Paul Grimault, also a member of Groupe Octobre. Together they wrote the screenplays of a number of animated movies, starting with the short 'The Little Soldier' ('Le Petit Soldat', 1947). They worked together until his death in 1977, when he was finishing The King and the Mocking Bird' (Le Roi et l'Oiseau'), a second version of which was released in 1980. Prévert adapted several Hans Christian Andersen tales into animated or mixed live-action/animated movies, often in versions loosely connected to the original. Two of these were with Grimault, including The King and the Mocking Bird, while another was with his brother Pierre Prévert.

 

 

Quasimodo, Salvatore. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1970. Penguin Books. 014042086x. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Italian & With an Introduction by Jack Bevan. 110 pages. paperback. The cover shows a drawing of Quasimodo by Renato Guttuso.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - In 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize for ‘his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experiences of life in our time.’ No previous edition of his work has been published in England. These new verse translations by Jack Bevan prove him to be, in the best sense, a contemporary poet, a major European voice, and a social and individual conscience - a poet who must he heard and heeded.

 

Salvatore Quasimodo (August 20, 1901 – June 14, 1968), pen name of Salvatore Ragusa, was an Italian author and poet. In 1959 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times’. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century. Quasimodo was born in Modica, Sicily to Gaetano and Clotilde Ragusa. In 1908 his family moved to Messina, as his father had been sent there to help the population struck by a devastating earthquake. The impressions of the effects of natural forces would have a great impact on the young Quasimodo. In 1919 he graduated from the local Technical College. In Messina he also made friends with Giorgio La Pira, future mayor of Florence. In 1917 Quasimodo founded the short-lived Nuovo giornale letterario (‘New Literary Journal’), in which he published his first poems. In 1919 he moved to Rome to finish his engineering studies, but poor economic conditions forced him to find a work as a technical draughtsman. In the meantime he collaborated with several reviews and studied Greek and Latin. In 1929, invited by Elio Vittorini, who had married Quasimodo's sister, he moved to Florence. Here he met poets such as Alessandro Bonsanti and Eugenio Montale. In 1930 he took a job with Italy's Civil Engineering Corps in Reggio Calabria. Here he met the Misefari brothers, who encouraged him to continue writing. Developing his nearness to the hermetic movement, Quasimodo published his first collection, Acque e terre (‘Waters and Earths’) in that year. In 1931 he was transferred to Imperia and then to Genoa, where he got acquainted with Camillo Sbarbaro and other personalities of the Circoli magazine, with which Quasimodo started a prolific collaboration. In 1932 he published with them a new collection, Oboe sommerso, including all his lyrics from 1930-1932. In 1934 Quasimodo moved to Milan. Starting from 1938 he devoted himself entirely to writing, working with Cesare Zavattini and for Letteratura, official review of the Hermetic movement. In 1938 he published Poesie, followed by the translations of Lirici Greci (‘Greek Poets’) published by Corrente di Vita in 1939. Though an outspoken anti-Fascist, during World War II Quasimodo did not take part in the Italian resistance against the German occupation. In that period he devoted himself to the translation of the Gospel of John, of some of Catullus's cantos, and several episodes of the Odyssey. In 1945 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1946 he published another collection, Giorno dopo giorno (‘Day After Day’), which made clear the increasing moral engagement and the epic tone of social criticism of the author. The same theme characterized his next works, La vita non è sogno (‘Life Is Not a Dream’), Il falso e il vero verde (‘The False and True Green’) and La terra impareggiabile (‘The Incomparable Land’). In all this period Quasimodo did not stop producing translations of classic authors and collaborating as a journalist for some of the most prestigious Italian publications (mostly with articles about the theatre). In the 1950s Quasimodo won the following awards: Premio San Babila (1950), Premio Etna-Taormina (1953), Premio Viareggio (1958) and, finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature (1959). In 1960 and 1967 he received honoris causa degrees from the Universities of Messina and Oxford, respectively. In his last years the poet made numerous voyages to Europe and America, giving public speeches and public lectures of his poems, which had been translated in several foreign languages. In June 1968, when he was in Amalfi for a discourse, Quasimodo was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage. He died a few days later in the hospital in Naples. He was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. Traditional literary critique divides Quasimodo's work into two major periods: the hermetic period until World War II and the post-hermetic era until his death. Although these periods are distinct, they are to be seen as a single poetical quest. This quest or exploration for a unique language took him through various stages and various modalities of expression. As an intelligent and clever poet, Quasimodo used a hermetical, ‘closed’ language to sketch recurring motifs like Sicily, religion and death. Subsequently, the translation of authors from Roman and Greek Antiquity enabled him to extend his linguistic toolkit. The disgust and sense of absurdity of World War II also had its impact on the poet's language. This bitterness, however, faded in his late writings, and was replaced by the mature voice of an old poet reflecting upon his world.

 

 

 

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1969. Penguin Books. 0140420797. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the German & With an Introduction J. B. Leishman. 93 pages. paperback. Cover design by Alan Spain.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Few writers of German poetry have exercised so great an influence on modern European literature as Rainer Maria Rilke, who died in 1926. Three years earlier he had published the famous DUINO ELEGIES, in which his personal struggles with the problems of God and of death found their noblest expression.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke was born on December 4, 1875 in Prague. He published his first book of poetry in 1894. The lover of Lou Andreas-Salome and secretary to Auguste Rodin, Rilke went on to become a famous figure in his own right, publishing his great book, New Poems, in 1907. After WWI, he moved permanently to Switzerland where he wrote the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in the last years of his life. He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926.

 

 

 

 

 

Ritsos, Yannis. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 014042184x. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos. Introduction by Peter Bien. 207 pages. paperback.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Despite his major international reputation as one of Europe’s most important poets today, this is the first English translation which attempts a comprehensive presentation of Yannis Ritsos’s voluminous work. Both short poems and one long narrative poem have been selected to illustrate dominant features of his poetry - his arresting use of metaphor; his manner of injecting complexity into simple scenes; his remarkable skill of fusing the legendary past of Greece with Greek life today. Together these deceptively simple and very moving poems convey something of the lyric and epic qualities of a great painter in words.

 

Yiannis Ritsos (1 May 1909 – 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931.  In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair. The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people. In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: he began to explore the conquests of surrealism through thedomain of dreams, surprising associations, explosions of images and symbols, a lyricism illustrative of the anguish of the poet, and both tender and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937) and Symphony of the Spring (1938).  During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) Ritsos became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front) and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the Left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek Left. In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros. Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was the greatest poet of our age. He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as theStalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared this prize is more important for me than the Nobel.  His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953).

 

 

Rozewicz, Tadeusz. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1976. Penguin Books. 0140421955. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Polish by Adam Czeriawski. 140 pages. paperback.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Rozewicz’s belief that ‘art’ gives offence to human suffering grew directly from his war experiences and was consolidated during Poland’s chaotic and tragic post-war period. He has invented his own type of anti-poem, stripped bare of all poetic device. His work possesses the authority of unflinching honesty; its urgency and barely controlled violence are tempered only by an essential compassion. His popularity within Poland is immense: he has been voted the most important living Polish poet and has received his country’s highest literary award. This volume reveals him -as a major European voice and a poet of international stature.

 

Tadeusz Rózewicz (born 9 October 1921) is a Polish poet, dramatist and writer. Rózewicz belongs to the first generation of Polish writers born after Poland regained its independence in 1918 following the century of foreign partitions. He was born in Radomsko near Lódz. His first poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army. His brother was executed by Gestapo in 1944. Tadeusz survived the war, finished high-school and enrolled at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, but in late 1940s moved to Wroclaw where he lived for the next thirty years. By the time of his literary debut as highly innovative playwright in 1960 with The Card Index (Kartoteka), he was already the author of fifteen acclaimed volumes of poetry published since 1944. He had written over a dozen plays and several screenplays. The eruption of dramaturgical energy was also accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Rózewicz is considered one of Poland's best postwar poets and most innovative playwrights. Some of his best known plays other than The Card Index include, The Interrupted Act (Akt przerywany, 1970), Birth Certificate (Swiadectwo urodzenia, screenplay to an award-winning film by the same tite, 1961), Left Home (Wyszedl z domu, 1965), and The White Wedding (Biale malzenstwo, 1975). His New Poems collection was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.

 

 

Tomlinson, Charles (editor). Renga: A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson. Middlesex. 1979. Penguin Books. 0140422684. Penguin Modern European Poets series. 96 pages. paperback. Cover design by Peter Brookes.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Based on the principle of the Japanese renga - a sequence of linked poems - this remarkable composition is the work of four poets of international stature: Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson. 'Renga', said The Times Literary Supplement when it was published in France, 'is a very significant book, appealing with a particular force to anyone who suspects that English poetry could do with a major renewal. It is a work of great beauty and of possibly seminal importance. It concentrates the internationalization of poetry. It is an education in reading. It is a new genre.' Published now for the first time in Britain, this multilingual poem appears with Charles Tomlinson's English translation on facing pages.

 

Poet, artist, and translator Charles Tomlinson (January 8, 1927, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom - August 22, 2015, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom) was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in 1927. Fluent in German, French, and Italian, he read English at Queen’s College Cambridge, studying with poet Donald Davie, who was an early influence and later became a close friend. Tomlinson taught elementary school before joining the University of Bristol, where he taught for 36 years. His collections of poetry include Relations and Contraries (1951), American Scenes and Other Poems (1966), To Be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant (1968), The Shaft (1978), Jubilation (1995), Skywriting and Other Poems (2003), for which he won the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and New Collected Poems (2009). Tomlinson’s work is known for its attention to both visual and aural perception, its painterly effects, and its cosmopolitan, even urbane, style and subject matter. Though he wrote of the natural world, especially in his early work, his philosophical bent and interest in other places and cultures—as well as his highly regarded work as a translator—made him somewhat of an outsider in British poetry. According to the critic Michael Hennessy, Tomlinson is the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation. At a time when most of his contemporaries were drawing inward, nursing and grooming their ‘Englishness,’ Tomlinson was traveling, engaging with the world, and enriching his work through the agency of American, European, and even Japanese poetic traditions. Tomlinson was a champion of America and American poetry. He held visiting positions at the University of New Mexico and Princeton University; his collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) was influenced by the landscape of the American Southwest, while Notes from New York, and Other Poems (1984) was prompted by a visit to New York. Essay collections such as Some Americans (1981) and American Essays (2001) also treated his long-standing relationship with American culture and poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review he remarked that his sense of America cohered out of many fragments, among them that tiny reproduction of a Georgia O'Keeffe, utterly unknown here at the time. I came to America at a period when the New York School had shifted attention from Paris to that city. For me, it was one of those periods of rapid assimilation—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, particularly Gorky. Tomlinson was influenced by American poets quite early in his career and admitted an affinity for American modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky. Critical Quarterly writer Alan Young compared the American modernist poets’ project to Tomlinson’s own ‘basic theme’, in Tomlinson’s words: ‘that one does not need to go beyond sense experience to some mythic union, that the I can only be responsible in relationship and not by dissolving itself away into ecstasy or the Oversoul.’ And Jonathan Barker, also quoting Tomlinson in the Times Literary Supplement, pointed out that Tomlinson rejects symbolic poetry as representing ‘a view of life too subjective to allow accurate contemplation of the outside world.’ Tomlinson is also known as a translator, and translated work by César Vallejo, Attilio Bertolucci, Antonio Machado, and Octavio Paz, with whom he wrote the collection Airborn/Hijos del aire (1981), a bilingual edition of a single poem which each poet translated into the language of the other. In his Paris Review interview, Tomlinson noted of his work with Paz on Airborn: I simultaneously came to realize just how many of our poets, going back to Chaucer, had been great translators, all the time extending the possibilities of English by introducing new forms and new ideas for poetry. So I went ahead and edited The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980). Tomlinson’s work as an editor—he has also edited Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969) and William Carlos Williams’ Selected Poems (1976)—and translator have secured his place as one of Britain’s most important and diverse talents. In learning his craft from numerous poets of varied backgrounds, Tomlinson has found a style all his own; critics such as Cal Bedient considered him to be unmistakably an original poet. Bedient continued in British Poetry since 1960: There is in him, it is true, a measure of Wordsworth ... [but] Wordsworth discovers himself in nature—it is this, of course, that makes him a Romantic poet. Tomlinson, on the other hand, discovers the nature of nature: a classical artist, he is all taut, responsive detachment. Ultimately, it is difficult to categorize Tomlinson as either distinctly British or American. To my mind, the poet Ed Hirsch has said, Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. He is one of the few English poets to have extended the inheritance of modernism and I suspect that his quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come. Charles Tomlinson became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Italian Premio Internationale Flaiano per la Poesia and the Bennett Award from the Hudson Review. He was made a CBE in 2001 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Gloucestershire in 2008. He died in 2015.

 

 

Tsvetayeva, Marina. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 0140421661. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein. Foreword by Max Hayward. 136 pages. paperback. Cover design by Sylvia Clench.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - When Boris Pasternak came across a volume of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry in 1922 he 'was immediately overcome by the immense lyrical power of her poetic form'. One of the most original Russian voices to emerge from the turmoil of the early twentieth century, Tsvetayeva, whose tragic life nourished her genius, seemed always to be drawn to doomed causes. Her commitment to White Russia caused interest in her work to decline, but in recent years her poetry has been rescued from obscurity and appreciated anew both in Russia and the West.

 

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature.  She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.

 

 

 

Ungaretti, Giuseppe. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140421394. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Edited & Translated from the Italian with an Introduction and Notes by Patrick Creagh. 112 pages. paperback. D139. The cover shows a portrait of Ungaretti, engraved on wax by Lucia Severino (photo John Hybert).

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Condensed and deceptively simple, the poems of Ungaretti are symbolic images expressed, with supreme mastery, in a language purged of rhetoric and sentimentality. A friend of Apollinaire, Ungaretti was influenced (as appears from his preoccupation with form and language) by Mallarme and Valery. In his view civilization itself is threatened today by 'a mad disintegration of words'. In this first selection to be published in English, Patrick Creagh has succeeded brilliantly in rendering into English poetry the work of a man who has claims to be regarded as the leading Italian poet of this century.

 

Giuseppe Ungaretti was the son of Tuscan peasants, who emigrated to Egypt and ran a small bakery in a suburb of Alexandria. He was born in 1888. It was not until 1912 that Ungaretti left Alexandria. He went to Paris, and on the way caught his first glimpse of Italy. The war broke out, and Ungaretti went to Milan, where he published his first poems in the magazine ‘Lacerba.’ When Italy entered the war in 1915 he joined up as a private in the infantry and was sent to the front line on the Carso. There he was in the thick of some of the worst fighting of the war. His first small volume was written in the trenches and published in 1916. These poems are included in Allegria (1919). Back in Paris after the war, he brought out a volume of poems in French (La Guerre), and married in 1920. He went to live in Rome the following year, supporting himself as a journalist. His second major volume, Sentimento del Tempo (The Feeling of Time), came out in 1933. In 1939 his nine-year-old son Antonietto died, and Ungaretti's grief is clear in Il Dolore (1947). The most important of his subsequent publications have been La Terra Promessa (1950), Un Grido e Paeraggi (1952), and Il Taccuino del Vecchio (1960), In addition he has translated works of Shakespeare and Blake, Gongora, Mallarme, Racine and others.

 

 

Weöres, Sándor and Juhasz, Ferenc. Selected Poems. Middlesex. 1970. Penguin Books. 0140421270. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Hungarian by Edwin Morgan & David Wevill. 136 pages. paperback. The cover shows: large detail, Sandor Weores; small detail, Ferenc Juhasz.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Right and left have done their worst in Hungary, forcing poets back into their private worlds. Writing - and often experimenting - in verse of great technical proficiency and range, Sándor Weöres uses primitive (and even invented) mythology to remind us of the far-off roots of our civilization. Nature and Hungarian folklore are very prominent in the prolific, passionate verses of Ferenc Juhasz, a poet at odds with his time, who has nevertheless contributed to it some of its finest work.

 

Sándor Weöres (22 June 1913 – 22 January 1989) was a Hungarian poet and author. Born in Szombathely, Weöres was brought up in the nearby village of Csönge. His first poems appeared when he was nineteen, being published in the influential journal Nyugat (‘West’) through the acceptance of its editor, the poet Mihály Babits. Weöres attended the University of Pécs, studying law first before moving on to geography and history. He ultimately received a doctorate in philosophy and aesthetics. His doctoral dissertation The Birth of the Poem was published in 1939. It was in 1937 that he made the first of his travels abroad, going first to Manila for a Eucharistic Congress and then visiting Vietnam and India. During World War II Weöres was drafted for compulsory labor, but was not sent to the front. After the end of the war, he returned to Csönge and briefly lived as a farmer. In 1948 Weöres again travelled abroad, residing in Italy until 1949. In 1951 he settled in Budapest where he would reside for the rest of his life. The imposition of Stalinism in Hungary after 1948 silenced Weöres and until 1964 little could be published. Weöres' translations into Hungarian were wide and varied, including the works of Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, the Georgian poet Rustaveli, the Slovenian poets Oton Župančič and Josip Murn Aleksandrov. He also translated Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Henry VIII, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the nonsense poems by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the complete poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. His translation of the Tao Te Ching continues to be the most widely read in Hungary. Many of Weöres' poems have been set to music. The Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály composed a choir on the poem Öregek (Old People) of the 14 years old poet, György Ligeti, a friend of the poet, set several poems from Rongyszőnyeg and other books in the composition Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel. Composer Peter Eötvöshas composed two pieces, Atlantis and Ima, with texts from Weöres' poem Néma zene (‘Silent Music’). In 1980 the Hungarian filmmaker Gábor Bódy adapted the poem Psyché to make the epic feature Nárcisz és Psyché. Ferenc Juhász (16 August 1928 – 2 December 2015) was a Hungarian poet and Golden Wreath laureate (1992). He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His brother was historian Gyula Juhász. Ferenc Juhász published his first poem in 1946. In 1949, he published his first book of poems, The Winged Foal. His poems, including The boy changed into a stag clamors at the gate of secrets, have been widely translated.

 

 

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. Selected Poems. Baltimore. 1963. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Russian & With an Introduction by Robin Milner-Gulland & Peter Levi. 92 pages. paperback. D69. Cover design by Barrett.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the fearless spokesman of his generation in Russia. In verse that is young, fresh, and outspoken he frets at restraint and injustice, as in his now famous protest over the Jewish pogrom at Kiev. But he can write lyrically, too, of the simple things of humanity - love, a birthday, a holiday in Georgia. And in ‘Zima Junction’ he brilliantly records his impressions on a visit to his home in Siberia.

 

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (born 18 July 1933) is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Baines, Phil. Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005. New York. 2005. Penguin Books. 9780141024233. 255 pages. paperback. Designed by David Pearson.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -  The extraordinary story of Penguin covers and their rich and diverse design heritage. Ever since the creation of the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935, their jackets have become a constantly evolving part of Britain’s culture and design history. Rich with stunning illustrations and filled with details of individual titles, designers and even the changing size and shape of the Penguin logo itself, this book shows how covers become in design classics. By looking back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, Phil Baines charts the development of British publishing, book-cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look. Coupling in-depth analysis of designers - from Jan Tschichold to Romek Marber - with a broad survey of the range of series and titles published - from early Penguins and Pelicans, to wartime and 1960s Specials, Classics, fiction and reference - this is a distinctive picture of how Penguin has consistently established its identity through its covers, influenced by – and influencing - the wider development of graphic design and the changing fashions in typography, photography, illustration and printing techniques. Filled with inspiring images, PENGUIN BY DESIGN demonstrates just how difficult it is not to judge a book by its cover.

 

 

Lewis, Jeremy. Penguin Special: The Story of Allen Lane, the Founder of Penguin Books and the Man Who Changed Publishing Forever. New York. 2005. Penguin Books. 0141024615. 484 pages.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -  The founding of Penguin Books in 1935 revolutionized the publishing industry with the idea that great writing ought to be made available for the price of a pack of cigarettes. In telling the story of Penguin and its founder, Allen Lane, Jeremy Lewis traces the changes the company wrought in cultural and political life in England and in the publishing industry worldwide, from the publication of Ulysses, with its attendant obscenity trial, to the Penguin Specials that alerted prewar Britain to the Nazi threat. Rich with anecdote and suffused with Lane's larger-than-life personality, Penguin Special touches on the entire twentieth century in its portrait of a man and a company that have changed the way the English- speaking world reads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WEB:

 

https://penguinchecklist.wordpress.com/early-series/poets/

http://www.penguinfirsteditions.com/index.php?cat=mainD

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/13/penguin-modern-poets-series-gets-21st-century-relaunch

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/ted-hughes-translation/

http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C1375#description

http://www.christies.com/features/Object_Alice_Rawthorn-5039-1.aspx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley. New York. 1924. Grosset & Dunlap. Illustrated With Scenes From The Photoplay. Published serially under the title of 'The Curse of Capistrano'. 300 pages. hardcover.

 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

This is the true first edition and first book appearance of this story which originally appeared as a magazine serial, as a 1920 film starring Douglas Fairbanks (which was itself based on the author's serialized story ‘The Curse of Capistrano'), and finally in book form in 1924. . . By all appearances, Don Diego Vega is an effete and foppish aristocrat, one of the noble class that cares nothing about the peasants who eke out a meager existence in Mexican California during the 1820s. But Don Diego's timorous reputation is merely a mask to conceal his alter ego: Zorro, a Californian Robin Hood whose swift blade strikes down those who exploit the poor and oppressed. This magnificent tale remains a prototype of swashbuckling, heroic fiction.

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 - November 23, 1958) was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro. Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others. McCulley started as a police reporter for The Police Gazette and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories. Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley's characters - The Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, and The Crimson Clown - were inspirations for the masked heroes that have appeared in popular culture from McCulley's time to the present day. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, he died in 1958 in Los Angeles, California aged 75.

 

 

 

 

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