Серия книг «Margellos World Republic of Letters» — 6 книг

In this inspired translation of "Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me", Ghassan Zaqtan's tenth and most recent poetry collection, along with selected earlier poems, Fady Joudah brings to English-language readers the best work by one of the most important and original Palestinian poets of our time. With these poems Zaqtan enters new terrain, illuminating the vision of what Arabic poetry in general and Palestinian poetry in particular are capable of. Departing from the lush aesthetics of such celebrated predecessors as Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, Zaqtan's daily, delicate narrative, whirling catalogues, and at times austere aesthetics represent a new trajectory, a significant leap for young Arabic poets today. In his preface to the volume, Joudah analyzes and explores the poet's body of work. "Ghassan Zaqtan's poems, in their constant unfolding", Joudah writes, "invite us to enter them, exit them, map and unmap them, code and decode them, fill them up and empty them, with the living and nonliving, the animate and inanimate, toward a true freedom".

In this inspired translation of "Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me", Ghassan Zaqtan's tenth and most recent poetry collection, along with selected earlier poems, Fady Joudah brings…

In the vein of the writings of Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul, The African Shore marks a major new installment in the genre of dystopic travel fiction. Rodrigo Rey Rosa, prominent in today's Guatemalan literary world and an author of growing international reputation, presents a tale of alienation, misrecognition and intrigue set in and around Tangier. He weaves a double narrative involving a Colombian tourist pleasurably stranded in Morocco and a young shepherd who dreams of migrating to Spain and of "riches to come". At the centre of their tale is an owl both treasured and coveted. The author addresses the anxiety, distrust and potential for violence that characterize the border of all borders: the strait that divides Africa and Europe, where the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet. His often-remarked prose style, at once rich and spare, endows his work with remarkable elegance. Rey Rosa generates a powerful reality within his imagined world, and he maintains a narrative tension to the haunting conclusion, raising small and large questions that linger in the reader's mind long after the final page.

In the vein of the writings of Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul, The African Shore marks a major new installment in the genre of dystopic travel fiction. Rodrigo Rey…

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein's bellicose dictatorship reaps war, economic disruption, occupation, and sectarian violence, one following another in dreadful succession. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad's inhabitants. Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon's novel shows us the heart of Iraq's complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a…

In his semiautobiographical novel, "Cyclops", Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theatre critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting in the front lines of World War II. As he wanders the streets of Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colourful circus of characters - fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and cafe intellectuals - all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever. A seminal work of postwar Eastern European literature, "Cyclops" reveals a little-known perspective on World War II from within the former Yugoslavia, one that has never before been available to an English-speaking audience. Vlada Stojiljkovic's able translation, improved by Ellen Elias-Bursac's insightful editing, preserves the striking brilliance of this riotously funny and densely allusive text. Along Melkior's journey "Cyclops" satirizes both the delusions of the righteous military officials who feed the national bloodlust as well as the wayward intellectuals who believe themselves to be above the unpleasant realities of international conflict. Through Stojiljkovic's clear-eyed translation, Melkior's peregrinations reveal how history happens and how the individual consciousness is swept up in the tide of political events, and this is accomplished in a mode that will resonate with readers of Charles Simic, Aleksandr Hemon, and Kundera.

In his semiautobiographical novel, "Cyclops", Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theatre critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides…

Set in New York City in the months preceding 9/11, Norman Manea's novel introduces us to the protagonist who, like the author himself, is a Romanian professor in exile and who struggles with loneliness, dislocation, the desire to hide. Yet his difficulties and dilemmas are uniquely his own, and his quest for inner peace - the comfort of a lair - is a literary journey of deep originality. Manea's novel takes elements of Mittel-Europa atmosphere, Byzantine heritage, Jewish-Greek perennial conflict, labyrinths, and libraries to America, where hierarchies of authority are upended, and where his story turns absurd and ultimately tragic. Manea has described himself as "an adventurer trying to humanize his shipwreck wherever he may be". His hero, too, is such an adventurer. Norman Manea's work places him in the literary family of such writers as Bruno Schultz, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka. Twice a survivor of totalitarian regimes, he often explores the implications of exile, and he illuminates the human tragicomedy with an intensity matched by no other author writing today.

Set in New York City in the months preceding 9/11, Norman Manea's novel introduces us to the protagonist who, like the author himself, is a Romanian professor in exile and who…

Umberto Saba's reputation in Italy and Europe has steadily grown since his death in 1957, and today he is positioned alongside Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most important Italian poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Until now, however, English-language readers have had access to only a few examples of this poet's work. This bilingual volume at last brings an extensive and exquisitely translated collection of Saba's poems to English-speaking readers. Both faithful and lyrical, George Hochfield's and Leonard Nathan's translations do justice to Saba's rigorous personal honesty and his profound awareness of the suffering that was for him coincident with life. An introductory essay, a translation of Saba's early manifesto, 'What Remains for Poets to Do', and a chronology of his life situate his poetics within the larger context of twentieth-century letters. With its publication, this volume provides the English-speaking world with a momentous occasion to rethink not just Italian poetry but also the larger European modernist project.

Umberto Saba's reputation in Italy and Europe has steadily grown since his death in 1957, and today he is positioned alongside Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the…