front cover of Attributed to the Harrow Painter
Attributed to the Harrow Painter
Nick Twemlow
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Attributed to the Harrow Painter reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker’s son’s remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it “looks like garbage.” What does it mean to be a minor artist, the poems wonder, like the Greek pot painter named in the book’s title, who is described by one critic as “indeed a minor talent, not withstanding the undeniable charm of some of his works”? What structures must be destroyed to clear the way for all the “minor” voices that litter the discourse of Western civilization? This is a mangled, tattered guide to transcendence through art in an age when such a thing seems nearly impossible.
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The Epic Histories (Buzandaran Patmut‘iwnk‘)
Attributed to P‘awstos Buzand
Nina G. Garsoïan
Harvard University Press, 1989

The late fifth-century anonymous Epic Histories, formerly known as the History of Armenia attributed to another unknown P‘awstos (Faustos) Buzand, form the earliest historical work written in Armenian. They are the main source for our knowledge of social structure, beliefs and customs of early Christian Armenia, and especially of the profound and lasting influence of Zoroastrian Persia on the recently converted country. This influence is evident in the very composition of the work, which owes as much to the lost oral tradition of the Iranian epic as to more familiar Classical and early Christian models.

Hence, it is unmatched for the reconstruction of the ambivalent world of the Near East in Late Antiquity at the cross roads between Classical and Iranian civilizations. Since no scholarly translation of this work into any Western language has been attempted for more than a century, much of its contribution has remained beyond the reach of most scholars. The aim of the present publication is to fill this lacuna by complementing the translation of the original Armenian text with a Commentary and Appendices that are intended to serve not only Armenian scholars but Classicists and Iranians alike.

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