BiblioVault - Books about Translations into English

The Ratcatcher

Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from the Russian by Angela Livingstone

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Winner of 2000 Heldt Translation Prize

The Ratcatcher, Marina Tsvetaeva's masterpiece, is a satirical version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend in the form of a complex narrative poem that bears all the marks of Tsvetaeva's poetic style. Written in 1926, it was not available in Russia until 1965, and has hitherto been virtually unknown in English.

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Readings from Classical Rhetoric

Edited by Patricia P. Matsen, Philip Rollinson, and Marion Sousa

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Here, for the first time in one volume, are all the extant writings focusing on rhetoric that were composed before the fall of Rome.

This unique anthology of primary texts in classical rhetoric contains the work of 24 ancient writers from Homer through St. Augustine, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Longinus.

Along with many widely recognized translations, special features include the first English translations of works by Theon and Nicolaus, as well as new translations of two works by important sophists, Gorgias’ encomium on Helen and Alcidamas’ essay on composition.

The writers are grouped chronologically into historical periods, allowing the reader to understand the scope and significance of rhetoric in antiquity. Introductions are included to each period, as well as to each writer, with writers’ biographies, major works, and salient features of excerpts.

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The Rebel's Silhouette

Selected Poems

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated and edited by Agha Shalid Ali

University of Massachusetts Press, 1995

Born in India and considered the leading poet on the South Asian subcontinent, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) was a two-time Nobel nominee and winner of the 1962 Lenin Peace Prize. His evening readings in Hindi/Urdu-speaking regions drew thousands of listeners. Associated with the Communist party in his youth, Faiz became an outspoken poet in opposition to the Pakistani government. This volume offers a selection of Faiz's poetry in a bilingual Urdu/English edition with a new introduction by poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali.

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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

Red Roofs and Other Stories

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro; Translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886–1965), the author of Naomi; A Cat, a Man, and Two Women; and The Makioka Sisters, was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The four stories in this volume date from the first and second decades of Tanizaki’s long career and reflect themes that appear throughout his work: exoticism, sexuality, sadomasochism, contrasts between traditional and modern societies, disparities between appearance and reality, the power of dreams, amorality, an interest in cinema, and a fascination with the techniques of storytelling. The stories—translated into English here for the first time—are: “The Strange Case of Tomoda and Matsunaga” (“Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi,” 1926), “A Night in Qinhuai” (“Shinwai no yo,” 1919), “The Magician” (“Majutsushi,” 1917), and “Red Roofs” (“Akai yane,” 1925).

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Regrowth

Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Nazi Occupation

Der Nister

Northwestern University Press, 2011

The seven stories that compose Regrowth (Vidervuks) might shock readers familiar with accounts of the Holocaust marked by mournful and sentimental overtones. Although the outcome is often terrible, Der Nister’s characters refuse to accept the role of victim. Likewise, the monstrosity of the perpetrators is not at issue: the Nazis may be abominable, but they do not warrant attention for longer than a savage animal would. Der Nister is drawn to parties capable of moral decision—and their dilemmas often feature an opponent that is inside one’s own people, inside oneself. “Flora,” for example, follows a father and daughter through the Nazi invasion and later Soviet occupation of a Polish-Jewish city.

Der Nister paints a sympathetic portrait of the father, a member of the Jewish Council, even though he collaborates with the Nazis in a misguided attempt to help his people. To repair the father’s mistake, his daughter joins the resistance, seduces a traitor, and delivers him to his death. Accounts are settled within the Jewish community. The Nazi enemy is largely passed over in the silence his infamy deserves. Der Nister’s characters are crafty, and they do not hesitate to use force when necessary. After the defeat of the Nazis and Soviet takeover, Der Nister suggests, the maneuvering will continue. The morally complex characters and richly layered stories of Regrowth ultimately reclaim a more nuanced view of crimes still not fully reckoned.

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Requiem for Ernst Jandl

Friederieke Mayröcker

Seagull Books, 2018

A lyrical requiem for Mayröcker's late partner, the writer Ernst Jandl.

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing. Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and—with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief—reads Jandl’s works in a new light. Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.

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Rereading the Spanish American Essay

Translations of 19th and 20th Century Women’s Essays

Edited by Doris Meyer

University of Texas Press, 1995

Latin American intellectual history is largely founded on essayistic writing. Women's essays have always formed a part of this rich tradition, yet they have seldom received the respect they merit and are often omitted entirely from anthologies.

This volume and its earlier companion, Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, seek to remedy that neglect. This book collects thirty-six notable essays by twenty-two women writers, including Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska. All of the essays are here translated into English for the first time, many by the same scholars who wrote critical studies of the authors in the first volume. Each author's work is also prefaced by a brief biographical sketch.

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Rethinking Japan's Modernity

Stories and Translations

M. William Steele

Harvard University Press, 2024

History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan’s engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events “at that time” and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations—two of them by Japan’s pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga—parodying Fukuzawa’s monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work—to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan’s past, present, and future.

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Rimbaud

Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition

Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud

University of Chicago Press, 2005

The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose.

The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius—among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works.

Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, Rimbaud remains the most authoritative—and now, completely up-to-date—edition of the young master's entire poetic ouvre.

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Risalo

Shah Abdul Latif

Harvard University Press, 2018

The greatest classic of Sindhi literature presented here in an authoritative and vivid modern English translation.

Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo is acknowledged across Pakistan and the wider diaspora as the greatest classic of Sindhi literature. In this collection of short Sufi verses, originally composed for musical performance, the poet creates a vast imaginative world of interlocking references to traditional Islamic themes of mystical and divine love and the scenery, society, and legends of the Sindh region.

Latif (1689–1752), a contemporary of the Panjabi poet Bullhe Shah, belonged to the class of Sufi saints whose shrines remain prominent features of the Sindhi landscape. The Risalo reflects Latif’s profound engagement with the fundamental literature of Islam as well as his openness to varied local traditions, including notable poems praising the spiritual devotion of local Hindu yogis.

This edition presents, alongside the original text in the Sindhi Naskh script, the first translation of the Risalo into modern English prose, offering a new readership access to the writings of one of the masters of Sufi poetry.

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Roman Poetry

From the Republic to the Silver Age

Translated and with Introduction by Dorothea Wender

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Meshing her own wit, verve, and gusto with that of the Roman poets she translates, Dorothea Wender strips both the cloak of awe and the dusty mantle of boredom from the classics.

Available for the first time in paper, these English verse translations of the major classical Roman poets feature hefty selections from the savage urban satire of Juvenal, the moving philosophy of Lucretius, the elegance of Horace, the grace and humor of Catullus, the grave music of Virgil, the passion of Propertius, the sexy sophistication of Ovid, and the obscenity of Martial.

Noting Wender’s “candor,” the Classical Outlook reported that in “20th-century terms, she makes the poems lively and pertinent.”

The Boston Globe said, “The conciseness is astonishing, the information [in the introductions to each poet] provocative. The freshness of the selections should do much to augment the audience for these poets and may even inspire examination of the originals.”

The best advice came from Wender herself: “Read these good poems.”

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Rome

Pedestrians Beware

Rafael Alberti

Swan Isle Press, 2024

Rafael Alberti’s collection of poems set in vibrant Rome, his home in exile from Spain.

After his long exile in France and Argentina following the Spanish Civil War, Rafael Alberti’s final home in exile was Rome, where he wrote Roma: Peligro para caminantes (Rome: Pedestrians Beware). There, Romulus and Remus sneak down to the Tiber to suckle on feral cats, a jack of all trades pisses on the poet’s shoes, whistling as he walks away, and in the Campo de’ Fiori the poet compares sonnets with the wandering spirit of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, all in the shadow of the glory of Rome’s imperial ruins.

Two suites of sonnets open and close the book, while in between, Alberti displays masterful poems in metered and free verse, rhyming couplets, and a numbered series of short poems. The blending of classical tradition with post-modern echoes the darkness and luminosity that exist within the poems, tinged with longing, nostalgia, love, as well as hope. In the end, the Eternal City is a refuge for Alberti:”I left for you all that I once held dear. / Oh Rome, my sorrow pleads, hold out your hands / and give me everything I left for you.”

This unique trilingual edition features exquisite and nuanced translations in English and Italian from the original Spanish by Anthony Geist and Giuseppe Leporace alongside visually evocative photographs of Rome by Adam Weintraub. Readers will want to take this poetic walk in Rome since what sometimes elicits caution, an aspect of danger, also becomes a destination for discovery.

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Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques

Dialogues

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

One of Rousseau’s later and most puzzling works and never before available in English, this neglected autobiographical piece was the product of the philosopher’s old age and sense of persecution. Long viewed simply as evidence of his growing paranoia, it consists of three dialogues between a character named “Rousseau” and one identified only as “Frenchman” who discuss the bad reputation and works of an author named “Jean-Jacques.” Dialogues offers a fascinating retrospective of his literary career.

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Rubble Flora

Selected Poems

Volker Braun

Seagull Books, 2019

Rubble Flora is a selection of poems from the distinguished, half-century-long career of German poet Volker Braun. Born in the former East Germany, Braun is a humane, witty, brave, and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. He might be said to have found a truly singular voice amid the colossal upheavals of 1989—exploring the triumph of capitalism and the languages of advertising, terror, politics, and war. At the same time, Braun is a sensual poet in tune with the natural landscape. He has his own touchstones in world literature, and many of his poems set quotations from Rimbaud, Shakespeare, and Brecht into his own context, where they work as ironic illuminations of a present plight. The literary principle of his work lies in the friction of these different voices, whether cast into free form, collage, or classical verse. Cumulatively, Rubble Flora offers a searing vision of these transformative decades.

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Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

A Bilingual Edition

Edited and Translated by Amanda Ewington

Iter Press, 2014

Russian Women Poets of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries is a bold, pioneering achievement. Not only does it bring to light a poetic tradition that has been totally forgotten for over two centuries, even in its country of origin, but it does so in a broadly inclusive fashion. It offers both the Russian texts (verified against their original publications) as well as accurate English translations, accompanied by short illuminating biographical and critical introductions. It thus makes this intriguing material accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, from the curious generalist to the scholar. This corpus of texts sheds significant light on the genesis and formation of modern Russian verse and on the ways in which this new cohort of poets strove to find their voice during a complex era of shifting literary, cultural and gender values, navigating between the male-oriented high genres of Neoclassicism and the “feminized” modes of Sentimentalism.
—Marcus C. Levitt
Professor, Department of Slavic Languages, University of Southern California

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