Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”

The Sleeping Gypsy is an important collection of poems by an American writer who was only twenty-nine when awarded the coveted Prix de Rome in 1958. When George Garrett’s first collected verse, The Reverend Ghost and Other Poems, appeared in Scribner’s Poets of Today: IV, critics hailed the emergence of an authentic new talent of great promise. Babette Deutsch, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, said, “His poems are short, highly charged, and also, as he intended, clear. They move rapidly, without waste, exhibiting a lively skill and vigor in action.… His sensitive perceptivity makes his thoughtful insights more memorable.” Louise Bogan, writing in the New Yorker, said, “It is good to come upon [in Garrett’s work] an ordered brilliance and effects, long neglected, that link us to the ancient tradition of English ‘song.’”

Readers will find in The Sleeping Gypsy all of the qualities that distinguished Garrett’s earlier collection of verse—the pointed, incisive writing, the abhorrence of “pretty” poetic words, the harsh impact of language that is, at the same time, strangely musical. Many will feel that, in this later work, these qualities have been enhanced and that Garrett’s advancing maturity indicates strongly that his early promise will be richly fulfilled.

This revised and updated bilingual edition of Sonnets and Other Poems offers a cross-section of lyric poetry by Portugal's Luís de Camões, author of The Lusiads (1572), the great Renaissance epic memoralizing Vasco da Gama's inaugural voyage to India (1497-99). A selection of forty sonnets is followed by poems using other metrical patterns and rhyme schemes, including terza rima, ottava rima, the sestina, the canzone, and the redondilha, a verse form typical of Portuguese poetry. Richard Zenith's fluid renditions, far from attempting to "update" Camões, closely adhere to the original text, employing modern English but resisting the temptation to expand on the relatively small and simple lexicon of the Portuguese. Along with discussing his method of translation, Zenith's illuminating introduction shows how Camões's life and work were intimately entwined.