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On Married Love. Eridanus
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press
Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Kings of Aragon and southern Italy. The dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, Pontano produced literary works in several genres and was the leader of the Neapolitan academy. Among his large poetic output are the two brilliantly original poetical cycles that comprise the present volume. On Married Love stakes out new ground in the Western tradition as the first sustained exploration of married love in first-person poetry. In Eridanus, which celebrates the poet’s love for a mistress, Pontano combines the familiar motifs of courtly love with the allusive matrix of classical elegy and his own distinctive vision. Both works are here translated into English for the first time.
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The Virtues and Vices of Speech
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press, 2019
Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet “Gioviano,” was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity.
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Baiae
Giovanni Gioviano PontanoTranslated by Rodney G. Dennis
Harvard University Press, 2006
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1426–1503) was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy, the presiding spirit of the Accademia Pontaniana, and chief minister and tutor to the Aragonese Kings of Naples. He was also the most innovative and versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, given the subtitle Baiae by their first editor Pietro Summonte, experiment brilliantly with the metrical form associated principally with the ancient Latin poet Catullus. The poems are the elegant offspring of Pontano’s leisure, written to celebrate love, good wine, friendship, nature, and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples. They are translated here for the first time into English.
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Dialogues
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press, 2012

Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was the most important Latin poet of the fifteenth century as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of Naples. His Dialogues are our best source for the humanist academy of Naples which Pontano led for several decades. They provide a vivid picture of literary life in the capital of the Aragonese seaborne empire, based in southern Italy and the Western Mediterranean. This first volume contains the two earliest of Pontano’s five dialogues. Charon, set in the underworld of classical mythology, illustrates humanist attitudes to a wide range of topics, satirizing the follies and superstitions of humanity. Antonius, a Menippean satire named for the founder of the Neapolitan Academy, Antonio Beccadelli, is set in the Portico Antoniano in downtown Naples, where the academicians commemorate and emulate their recently-deceased leader, conversing on favorite topics and stopping from time to time to interrogate passersby.

This volume contains a freshly-edited Latin text of these dialogues and the first translation of them into English.

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Dialogues
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press, 2012

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503) served five kings of Naples as a courtier, official, and diplomat, and earned even greater fame as a scholar, prose author, and poet. His Dialogues reflect his diverse interests in religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as in everyday life in fifteenth-century Naples. They are especially important for their vivid picture of the contemporary gatherings of Pontano and his friends in the humanist academy over which he presided from around 1471 until shortly before his death.

Volume 2 includes the Actius, named for one of its principal speakers, the great Neo-Latin poet Jacopo Sannazaro, and contains a perceptive treatment of poetic rhythm, the first full treatment of the Latin hexameter in the history of philology. The dialogue continues with a discussion of style and method in history writing, a landmark in the history of historiography. This is a new critical edition of the Actius and the first translation of this dialogue into English.

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Dialogues
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press, 2012

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503) served five kings of Naples as a courtier, official, and diplomat, and earned even greater fame as a scholar, prose author, and poet. His Dialogues reflect his diverse interests in religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as in everyday life in fifteenth-century Naples. They are especially important for their vivid picture of the contemporary gatherings of Pontano and his friends in the humanist academy over which he presided from around 1471 until shortly before his death.

This volume completes the I Tatti edition of Pontano’s five surviving dialogues and features both Aegidius and Asinus. The conversation in Aegidius, named for the Augustinian theologian Giles of Viterbo, ranges over various topics, including creation, dreams, free will, the immortality of the soul, the relation between heaven and earth, language, astrology, and mysticism. The Asinus is less a dialogue than a fantastical autobiographical comedy in which Pontano himself is represented as having gone mad and fallen in love with an ass. This is the first translation of these dialogues into English.

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Eclogues. Garden of the Hesperides
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
Harvard University Press, 2022

A renowned Renaissance poet’s homage to Naples makes its debut in modern English translation.

Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of southern Italy. The dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, Pontano produced literary works in several genres and was the leader of the Neapolitan academy. The two works included in the present volume, broadly inspired by Virgil, might be considered Pontano’s love songs to the landscapes of Naples. The Eclogues offer a spectacular, panoramic tour of the Bay of Naples region, even as they focus on intimate domestic scenes and allegorize the people and places of the poet’s world. The Garden of the Hesperides is a work of brilliant erudition on an unprecedented poetic topic: the cultivation of citrus trees and the splendid pleasures of gardens. This volume features a newly established Latin text of the Garden of the Hesperides as well as the first published translations of both works into English.

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Latin Poetry
Jacopo Sannazaro
Harvard University Press, 2009
Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), considered by some authorities the finest Neo-Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance, spent most of his career in Naples, where he was a member and ultimately the head of the Accademia Pontaniana. He is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Virgil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form, as well as elegies, epigrams, and a number of shorter works.This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.
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Essays and Dialogues
Bartolomeo ScalaTranslated by Renée Neu WatkinsIntroduction by Alison Brown
Harvard University Press, 2008

From humble beginnings, Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence as a leading citizen of Florence, serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence, a post he held for fifteen years. His palace in Borgo Pinti, modeled on classical designs, was emblematic of his achievements as a humanist as well as a public official. Along with his professional writings as chancellor, Scala’s personal treatises, fables, and dialogues—widely read and admired by his contemporaries—were deeply indebted to classical sources. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show his acquaintance with recently rediscovered ancient writers, whose works he had access to through the Medici libraries, and the influence of fellow humanists such as Marsilio Ficino, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Perhaps the most significant is the Defense against the Detractors of Florence, a key document in the development of modern republicanism.

This volume presents fresh translations by Renée Neu Watkins of five of the texts based on Latin editions by Alison Brown, who also contributes an introduction to Scala’s life and works.

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A Comedy Called Susenbrotus
Connie McQuillen
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The comedy Susenbrotus is a neo-Latin play, written by the students of Trinity College Cambridge and performed before King James I at Royston in March 1615/16. It has never before been edited or translated. This edition contains the Latin text (prepared from a collation of the two extant manuscript copies), an English translation with annotations to classical and contemporary allusions, and an introduction tracing the development of humanist Latin drama in the universities during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Susenbrotus is in many ways representative of later university comedy. It is a rowdy, bawdy farce with roots in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. The wit and much of the humor in these plays is in the reworking of traditional themes with characters and situations adapted to contemporary types and topical satire. Almost every playwright for the professional stage (with the notable exception of Shakespeare) either wrote or acted in university plays. Moreover, they were popular forms of entertainment and were attended not only by members of the academic community but also by visiting dignitaries, courtiers, foreign ambassadors, and on occasion, the English monarchs.
Susenbrotus is special among later university plays because it was specifically written for King James I. It was meant to flatter the king, who prided himself on his humanist education, with a display of wit and erudition. It was also meant to entertain: the play itself is quite funny. It involves the antics of several contemporary types (the pedant, a poet, a Spanish dandy, and a braggart soldier) vying for the affection of a cross-dressed boy. Much of the wit in Susenbrotus is verbal: scholarly puns, sexual metaphors, classical allusions, and quotations that are explained in annotations. The sustained transvestitism of the character Fortunia distinguishes it from its classical sources as well as from other plays of its type. Unlike Latin texts that were submitted to publishing houses and therefore corrected or stylized by printers, Susenbrotus is an example of Latin as it was written in the seventeenth century.
Connie McQuillen is Associate Professor of Humanities, Southwest State University, Minnesota.
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Correspondence
Lorenzo Valla
Harvard University Press, 2013
Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters are fewer than those of many of his contemporaries, since he never collected or consciously preserved them. For that reason they afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interesting of the Italian humanists. They show him as a teacher and secretary, but above all as a writer who continually worked and reworked his major contributions to dialectic and philology, notably his masterpiece on the Elegances of the Latin Language, a central text of the Renaissance. More plentiful are the letters of others to him, which place him at the center of a humanist network that extended from Venice to Naples. They also shed light on the furious polemics in which he involved himself. These letters, including one previously unpublished, are now edited for the first time alongside Valla's own correspondence. The translation is the first into any modern language.
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Short Epics
Edited and translated by Michael C. J. Putnam with James Hankins
Harvard University Press, 2004
Maffeo Vegio (1407-1458) was the outstanding Latin poet of the first half of the fifteenth century. This volume includes Book XIII of Vergil's Aeneid, Vegio's famous continuation of the Roman epic, which was extremely popular in the later Renaissance, printed many times and translated into every major European language (and even into Scottish). It also contains three other epic works: Astyanax, based on an episode in the Iliad; The Golden Fleece (Vellus Aureum); and Antonias, a short epic based on the life of Saint Anthony of Egypt. Antonias is the first Christian epic of the Renaissance, a precursor of Milton's Paradise Lost. This volume contains the first modern editions of the Latin text of Antonias and Astyanax.
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On Discovery
Polydore VergilEdited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver
Harvard University Press, 2002
The Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555) was born in Urbino but spent most of his life in early Tudor England. His most popular work, On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. Thirty Latin editions of this work were published in Polydore's lifetime, and by the eighteenth century more than a hundred editions had appeared in eight languages, including Russian. On Discovery became a key reference for anyone who wanted to know about "firsts" in theology, philosophy, science, technology, literature, language, law, material culture, and other fields. Polydore took his information from dozens of Greek, Roman, biblical, and Patristic authorities. His main point was to show that many Greek and Roman claims for discovery were false and that ancient Jews or other Asian peoples had priority. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil's lifetime.
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Fiammetta. Paradise
Ugolino Verino
Harvard University Press, 2016
Ugolino Verino (1438–1516) was among the principal Latin poets in the Florence of Lorenzo de’Medici. A student of Cristoforo Landino, whose youthful love poems Verino imitated, Verino was a leading figure in the Renaissance revival of ancient Latin elegy. He blended Propertius, Ovid’s Amores, and elements of Petrarch’s lyric style to forge a distinctive poetic voice in a three-book cycle of poems in honor of his lady-love, Fiammetta. His Paradise, by contrast, is a vision-poem indebted to Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante, and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, in which Ugolino is taken on a tour of Heaven and the afterlife by the recently deceased Cosimo de’Medici.
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Christiad
Marco Girolamo Vida
Harvard University Press, 2009
Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), humanist and bishop, came to prominence as a Latin poet in the Rome of Leo X and Clement VII. It was Leo who commissioned his famous epic, the Christiad, a retelling of the life of Christ in the style of Vergil, which was eventually published in 1535. It was by far the most popular Christian epic of the Renaissance, appearing in almost forty editions before 1600. It was translated into many languages, including Croatian and Armenian, and was widely imitated by vernacular poets such as Abraham Cowley and John Milton. This translation, accompanied by extensive notes, is based on a new edition of the Latin text.
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Teaching Foreign Language Skills
Second Edition
Wilga M. Rivers
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Since its original publication in 1968, Rivers's comprehensive and practical text has become a standard reference for both student teachers and veteran instructors. All who wish to draw from the most recent thinking in the field will welcome this new edition. Methodology is appraised, followed up by discussions on such matters as keeping students of differing abilities active, evaluating textbooks, using language labs creatively, and preparing effective exercises and drills. The author ends each chapter of this new edition with questions for research and discussion—a useful classroom tool—and provides an up-to-date bibliography that facilitates further understanding of such matters as the bilingual classroom.
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An Irish-Speaking Island
State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870
Nicholas M. Wolf
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
After 1770, Ireland experienced the establishment of modern forms of Irish Catholicism, new engagement by the public with the political process, and the growth of the modern state, represented by new legal and educational systems. An Irish-Speaking Island investigates the role in these developments of the population who spoke Irish in their daily lives—whether as a first or second language—and links the history of language contact and bilingualism with the broader history of Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
            As late as 1840, Ireland had as many as four million Irish speakers—a significant proportion of the total population—who could be found in every county of the island and in all social classes and religious persuasions. Their impact on the modern history of Ireland and the United Kingdom cannot be captured by a simple conclusion that they became anglicized. Rather, Nicholas M. Wolf explores the complex ways in which the transition from Irish to English placed a premium on adaptive bilingualism and shaped beliefs and behavior in the domestic sphere, religious life, and oral culture within the community. An Irish-Speaking Island will interest not only historians but also scholars of linguistics, folklore, politics, literature, and religion.

Winner, Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture, American Conference for Irish Studies

Winner, Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books, American Conference for Irish Studies
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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier
The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail
Patrick J. Mahoney
University of North Texas Press, 2021

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The World of Kate Roberts
Selected Stories, 1925-1981
Joseph Clancy
Temple University Press, 1991
Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1991, 1991 Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre. The World of Kate Roberts offers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words. The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' fiction: material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture."
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Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages
Edited by Danièle Godard
CSLI, 2010

Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages compares six Romance languages—Catalan, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian—and summarizes the last thirty years of scholarship in the fields of morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse for each language. The up-to-date analyses in this volume make it essential for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of each language.

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From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts
Peter Boyd-Bowman
Georgetown University Press, 1980

This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes.

The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change.

From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.

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Discover Romanian
An Introduction to the Language and Culture
RODICA BOTOMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1995
Discover Romanian's thorough treatment of both language and culture makes it an effective learning tool in classroom and individualized settings.

This comprehensive introduction to Romanian for English-speaking students emphasizes communication with a complete treatment of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a focus on the four major language skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Cultural information, an integral part of the textbook, is presented both formally, in sections on culture and civilization, and informally, as the setting for dialogues and exercises. Tables of verb conjugations and a glossary round out the book's primary materials.

Straightforward and accessible, Discover Romanian is an essential textbook for all those teaching and learning the language and provides important information for those seeking to understand Romanian culture.
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Rakes of the Old Court
A Novel
Mateiu Caragiale, Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.
 
Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.
 
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Bengal Nights
A Novel
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman à clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent.

Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair.

A vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power.

Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.
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Youth Without Youth
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard.  Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.

At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella.  Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.  Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural.  In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.

Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery.  It was adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years.

 “A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade’s novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
 
Youth Without Youth reads like a surreal collaboration by Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a genius.”—William Allen, author of Starkweather and The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances
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Wasted Morning
A Novel
Gabriela Adamesteanu
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Upon its original publication in 1983, Wasted Morning catapulted Gabriela Adamesteanu to the first rank of Romanian novelists. She has since been translated into many languages, and now her most famous novel is available in English for the first time. At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delca, a simple, poor woman in her seventies who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. 

She's a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, so it is through her that Adamesteanu is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel are brought vividly to life. From Bucharest's aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.
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The Grand Prize and Other Stories
Daniela Crasnaru
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Daniela Crasnaru is one of the most prominent poets and short story writers in her native Romania. Once a vocal foe of the Ceauçescu regime, Crasnaru was influenced by the political repression of the communist period; but her short stories depart from those of the many Eastern European writers who use literature purely as a forum for political expression. She also focuses her sympathetic eye on the human foibles of ordinary people whose lives are limited by feelings of helplessness and failure.

Crasnaru portrays the lives of people so used to hardship that it never occurs to them to surrender. An unhappily married woman waits in vain for a call from a potential lover. A foul-mouthed mother of seven accuses a war hero of conning her out of her life savings. A lawyer is lured to a forest by a dead coworker's stories of a beautiful woman. Those with drab lives use fantasy to endure and those who believe themselves happy are forced to face grim realities. Crasnaru mixes elements of the ridiculous, the fanciful, and the grotesque with vivid realism and her remarkable stories, while taking place in a dark era in her nation's history, are about the human as well as the Romanian condition.
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Compulsory Happiness
Norman Manea
Northwestern University Press, 1994
In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, Norman Manea's four novellas create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary, and the painful search for an ideal.
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Zenobia
Gellu Naum
Northwestern University Press, 1995
One of the best-known novels by prolific Romanian avant-garde writer Gelu Naum, Zenobia is the evocation of the singular quest of a Surrealist knight-errant who strives to be true to the gentle demands of his lady in a landscape of snares, desolation, incipient madness, and material poverty magically interrupted by moments of extreme beauty.

His wife, artist Lyggia Naum, was the inspiration for the title character. In this 1985 masterpiece, penned in the twilight of the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, love, in all its intimate, carnal communion, lights the path through the dark forest, the streets of Bucharest, and the desert swamps. The narrator, speaking from the depths of love and despair, invites the reader to share his quest. Highly praised now and then, Zenobia is an enduring avant-garde classic of twentieth-century Eastern European literature.
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Coming from an Off-Key Time
A Novel
Bogdan Suceava
Northwestern University Press, 2011

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked, in one famous formulation, the "end of history." In his apocalyptic novel Coming from an Off-Key Time, Bogdan Suceavă satirizes the events in his native Romania since the violent end of the Ceauşescu regime that fateful year.

Suceavă uses three interrelated narratives to illustrate the destructive power of Romanian society’s most powerful mythologies. He depicts madness of all kinds but especially religious beliefs and their perversion by all manner of outrageous sects. Here horror and humor reside impossibly in the same time and place, and readers experience the vertiginous feeling of living in the middle of a violent historical upheaval.

Even as Coming from an Off-Key Time suggests the influence of such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, the fantastic satirist of the early Soviet Union, Suceavă engages the complexities of a quickly changing country in search of its bearings and suspicious of its past. Bogdan Suceavă is an associate professor of mathematics at California State University, Fullerton. One of Romanian literature’s most promising and original young writers, he is the author of four novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of poems.

Alistair Ian Blyth’s previous translations include Filip Florian, Little Fingers (2009); Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Our Circus Presents (2009); and Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (2009).

 

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Mastering Italian through Global Debate
Marie Bertola
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Critical engagement with complex global issues that provides an effective approach to promoting linguistic proficiency and social responsibility

Mastering Italian through Global Debate is a one-semester textbook designed for students with Advanced-level Italian language skills, moving toward Superior and above. Over the course of each chapter, students gain linguistic and rhetorical skills as they prepare to debate on broad, timely topics, including environmental consciousness, immigration, wealth distribution, surveillance and privacy, cultural diversity, and education. Discussion of compelling issues promotes not only linguistic proficiency but social responsibility through critical engagement with complex global challenges.

Each chapter includes topic-specific reading texts and position papers, giving students insight into issues being widely discussed—and debated—in Italy today. In addition to pre- and post-reading activities, students benefit from lexical development exercises, rhetorical methods sections, and listening exercises with audio available on the Press website. Online resources for instructors include pedagogical recommendations and an answer key.

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Interpretazioni
Italian Language and Culture through Film
Cristina Pausini and Carmen Merolla
Georgetown University Press, 2019

Interpretazioni is an intermediate- to advanced-level Italian textbook that aims to teach language through film, focusing on Italian movies from 2010 to 2017. Teaching language through cinema is a widespread and proven practice that engages all four main language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing), and Interpretazioni utilizes the proven format and pedagogy of Pausini and Antonello Borra's previous book, Italian Through Film (Yale UP, 2003), which is regarded highly among teachers. Films featured in Interpretazioni span genres, address a wide range of themes, and are set in various parts of Italy, encouraging students and teachers to more fully engage with the complexity of Italian cinema. As in Italian through Film, the activities based on the films are divided into three main categories (before, during, and after viewing the film) with a natural progression from warm-up questions to closed and controlled exercises to open-ended and creative tasks–both oral and written–including grammar practice, all within the context of each single film. An instructor's manual with answer keys and suggestions on using apps for teaching is available on the www.press.georgetown.edu website.

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A Lexical Approach to Italian Cliticization
Paola Monachesi
CSLI, 1999
This volume examines the behavior of clitics both in Italian and in certain southern Italian dialects in order to show that, even within a single language, clitics exhibit different properties. Monachesi argues against the existence of a special class 'clitics' whose elements exhibit variable behavior. Instead, she decomposes and assimilates their properties to those of well established categories. Motivations are thus provided for treating Italian object clitics as affixes. It is shown that both their morphosyntactic and their phonological behavior argue in favor of this assumption. Under this view, a lexicalist analysis is proposed which takes into account the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of Italian clitics.
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French Lessons
A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
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French Lessons
A Memoir
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.

When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.

French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
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front cover of New Observations on the French Language, with Praises of Illustrious Learned Women
New Observations on the French Language, with Praises of Illustrious Learned Women
Marguerite Buffet
Iter Press, 2023
Two volumes by a seventeenth-century French gentlewoman and teacher, published in English for the first time.
 
According to the few historical records that mention Marguerite Buffet, she lived her entire life in seventeenth-century Paris where she taught French to aristocratic women. Buffet’s vivid example of proper language use in New Observations on the French Language offers a rare glimpse into the life, habits, and culture of seventeenth-century France. She describes common errors in contemporary language use and gives examples of correct expressions for speaking and writing all the while encouraging women to aspire to higher levels of intellectual achievement.
 
In addition, her Praises of Illustrious Learned Women, a catalog of biographies of women who displayed exemplary intellect, wit, and conversation, includes a number of the author’s contemporaries such as Anna Maria van Schurman and Madeleine de Scudéry. Buffet’s collected praises of these women, many of whom were connected to the court of Louis XIV, show her unique position as both a participant in and historian of the intellectual and social world of the French salon.
 
This volume presents Buffet’s work in its near entirety for the first time in English, bringing to light Buffet’s unique contribution to the centuries-long debate concerning the status of women known as the querelle des femmes.
 
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Affaires globales
S'engager dans la vie professionnelle en français, niveau avancé
Deborah S. Reisinger, Mary Beth Raycraft, and Nathalie Dieu-Porter
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Develop language skills and cultural knowledge essential for a career in the francophone world

Affaires globales' broad scope of disciplines and cultural content will appeal to students interested in a wide variety of careers while giving them the skills needed to pursue them. This intermediate-high to advanced-level French textbook is designed for French for specific purposes courses such as business or professional French and can be used as a main text for one semester or adapted for two semesters of use.

Affaires globales uses an interdisciplinary multiliteracies approach to help students develop the cultural knowledge and language skills necessary to pursue a career in the francophone world. Over the textbook's seven units, Affaires globales weaves in contemporary themes such as entrepreneurship, sustainable development, and global engagement with discussions of tourism, business, marketing, fashion, diplomacy, environmental studies, and global health. Lessons incorporate authentic materials from across the francophone world, from France to Quebec to sub-Saharan Africa.

Features:

A wide selection of activities—true or false, fill in the blank, multiple choice, and open-ended questions— allow students to engage with course material in varied ways

Chapter activities contribute to a semester-long project that helps students evaluate their career goals and reflect on their growth throughout the course

Free access to authentic multimedia resources and instructors' materials

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Comme on dit
Première année de français, Student's Edition
Claude Grangier and Nadine O. Di Vito
Georgetown University Press, 2018

E-Textbooks are now available to purchase or rent through VitalSource.com! Please visit VitalSource for more information on pricing and availability.

As of January 1, 2021, the Smart Sparrow Companion Websites are no longer available. Soon, we will announce a new set of companion websites. Demos for the new companion websites will be available for instructors to sample beginning in spring 2021. The complete websites will be ready in time for students to use them during the fall 2021 semester.

Until the new companion websites become available, eBook Workbooks with exercises from the Smart Sparrow Electronic Workbook are available for purchase on the GUP website and VitalSource.com, as are Workbook Answer Keys. They will both be sold in eBook format only.

Comme on dit, a comprehensive first-year French textbook program, engages students in the learning process from day one using an inductive methodology centered on guided observation and rule discovery. Together with students’ communicative needs and an analysis of their most pervasive transfer errors from English, the everyday speech patterns of 100 native speakers—culled from 150 hours of unscripted recordings—form the linguistic backbone of the method. Using a workbook format, students examine, compare, and contrast this wide variety of authentic discourse to discover both individual and shared language use and cultural perspectives. Additionally, students systematically and progressively acquire the fundamental sounds and rhythmic patterns of spoken French, which leads them to develop solid pronunciation and conversational fluency as well as notable listening comprehension skills. To aid instructors in effectively implementing this distinctive approach, the Teacher’s Edition textbook comes with answers for all activities, plus teaching notes in the margins and extensive ancillary resources online. By the end of one academic year, students with no prior French instruction can expect to achieve Intermediate-Mid to Intermediate-High proficiency on the ACTFL scale.

Features of Comme on dit:

• Emphasis on providing students with the tools and skills to help them communicate early on about topics relevant to them and their daily lives• Equal focus on all four major skill areas—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—and on the establishment of a solid grammatical and lexical foundation• Over 1,000 audio and video files, giving students ample material to practice listening to French as it is spoken by native speakers• Over 250 snippets of written authentic discourse, ranging from book titles to proverbs• Teacher’s Edition textbook with answers for all activities, plus teaching notes in the margins• Extensive ancillary instructor’s resources, including an instructor’s manual, quizzes, sample midterm and final exams, available at CommeOnDitTextbook.com

For Instructors: To sample the eTextbook, please visit VitalSource.com to create an account. After you login, you may request a free copy by clicking on "Faculty Sampling" in the upper right-hand corner, searching for the "Digital Exam Copy," and selecting "Request Sample".

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On tourne!
French Language and Culture through Film
Véronique Anover and Rémi Fournier Lanzoni
Georgetown University Press, 2020

eTextbooks are now available through VitalSource.com!

On tourne! is a one-semester, advanced French textbook (5th/6th semester of instruction) designed to be used as a stand-alone text for a course on French and francophone films or for a French conversation course. This textbook could also be used as a supplementary text in an advanced conversation course, a composition course, or a contemporary culture course. On tourne! guides students to analyze and discuss thirteen films from France and the francophone world. Each chapter focuses on a single film and includes pre-viewing activities, vocabulary, information on the cultural and linguistic nuances of the film, and post-viewing activities and discussion points. Moreover, each chapter contains a review of an essential grammatical structure as well as idiomatic expressions used in the film to highlight their pragmatic function. The films included explore a wide array of themes, ranging from family, food, and fashion to politics, religion, and racial/ethnic identities.

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