FIELD TRANSLATION SERIES

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Anna Akhmatova
POEM WITHOUT A HERO
& SELECTED POEMS
(translated by Lenore Mayhew
& William McNaughton)

Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of our century, has, like all Russian poets, proved difficult to translate. These distinctive versions of a broad selection of her work capture her plainness and directness while searching out an analog to her music in the careful and subtle music of American free verse. The result is not a replication of Akhmatova's style but a complement to it that often startles and gratifies with a starkness and beauty all its own.

Dino Campana
ORPHIC SONGS
(translated by Charles Wright)

Perhaps Dino Campana is the ultimate Symbolist. Whatever we call him, the small body of prose and free verse he left us is magical and haunting in the way it combines the visual with the visionary.

Charles Wright, whose award-winning translation of Montale's The Storm launched the FIELD Translation Series, is Campana's ideal translator.

Herman de Coninck
THE PLURAL OF HAPPINESS
(translated by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown)

Belgium's leading poet for many decades, de Coninck has never been translated into English and collected in a single extended volume until now.

"Reading this book, I was amazed again and again by the skill of Bosselaar and Brown. They make it hard to imagine that these strange, original, and absolutely fabulous poems were written in any other language but English."
--Charles Simic

Gunter Eich
VALUABLE NAIL
(translated by Stuart Friebert,
David Walker, & David Young)

Who is Germany's most important postwar poet? We think it is Gunter Eich, the courageous and remarkably inventive poet who died in 1972. This beautiful black and silver volume should be in the library of anyone who cares about modern and postmodern poetry.

FIVE T'ANG POETS:
Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho,
Li Shang-yin
(translated by David Young)

This expanded and updated version of one of our most popular titles takes in a fifth master, the difficult love poet Li Shang-yin, who lived in the later years of the dynasty. Taken together, the selections from the five poets represented here constitute some of the greatest lyric poetry ever written.

Judith Herzberg
BUT WHAT
(translated by Shirley Kaufman)

Because Judith Herzberg, Dutch poet, playwright, and screenwriter, makes her home part of the year in Amsterdam and part of the year in Tel Aviv, it was possible for her to collaborate directly with the Jerusalem-based American poet Shirley Kaufman on this impressive selection from her poetry. As witness to history and acute recorder of human relationships, this poet writes with extraordinary compassion and superb control.

Miroslav Holub
INTENSIVE CARE:
SELECTED AND NEW POEMS

This collection spans almost 40 years of writing, much of it under circumstances that involved risk and silence, living under Communism in Czechoslovakia, pursuing a career as a scientist, and carrying on the 20th century's experimental tradition as represented by artists like Arp, Miro, and William Carlos Williams. By the time of his death in 1998, Miroslav Holub had become one of the most widely acclaimed poets on the planet.

Miroslav Holub
VANISHING LUNG SYNDROME
(translated by David Young & Dana Habova)

Miroslav Holub's first new collection after Interferon is organized around a series of medical metaphors. The contents are darkly witty and mordantly accurate: they document the ignorance, folly, and brutality abroad in our world, most notably in Czechosolvakia before the November revolution of 1989. They also brim with tenderness, humor, and occasional gleams of hope.

Max Jacob
SELECTED POEMS
(translated by William Kulik)

Even though he was an important founder of modernism, companion to Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire, and the early Surrealists, Max Jacob has remained a somewhat neglected and little-known figure. Now this delightful and utterly original poet has been given a detailed and careful presentation in English.

Attila Jozsef
WINTER NIGHT: SELECTED POEMS
(translated by John Batki)

A radiant body of work lies in the shadow cast by the Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef's tragic suicide at 32. In pure song-like lyrics and longer elegiac poems Jozsef inscribed not only his sad fate but that of millions in an Eastern Europe that was only nominally "between the wars" during the '20s and '30s of the last century.

Venus Khoury-Ghata
HERE THERE WAS ONCE
A COUNTRY
(translated by Marilyn Hacker)

Lebanese writer Venus Khoury-Ghata, who lives in France and has won many of France's major literary prizes, blends French surrealism with Arabic poetry's communal narrative mode in three stunning poetic sequences, presented here in distinguished translations by Marilyn Hacker.

Abba Kovner
MY LITTLE SISTER
AND SELECTED POEMS
(translated by Shirley Kaufman)

The title sequence is justly famous as one of the major pieces of literature to come out of the Holocaust. It appears here with a new selection of Abba Kovner's work spanning his forty-plus years as one of Israel's leading poets. The noted American-Israeli poet Shirley Kaufman had the privilege of working directly with Kovner on these versions in the years before his death.

Karl Krolow
ON ACCOUNT OF
(translated by Stuart Friebert)

Karl Krolow, who died in 1999, was the last great German poet of his generation. This selection, which includes the brilliant sequences "Time Passing" and "Body," does justice to his remarkable range and quiet authority.

Eugenio Montale
SELECTED POEMS
(translated by Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, & David Young)

Profoundly rooted in the Italian landscape and culture and with an enormous sensitivity to his language and its heritage, Montale shaped poems throughout his life that were mysterious, resonant, and layered with meanings. His poems range from daily life through history and myth, and on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim, he has few equals.

Eugenio Montale
THE STORM & OTHER POEMS
(translated by Charles Wright)

A brilliant translation of one of the greatest single collections of poetry in this century, Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale's gathering of his work from 1940 to 1956.

This first complete translation into English, The Storm & Other Poems won the distinguished PEN Translation Award for 1978.

Emmanuel Moses
HE AND I
(translated by Marilyn Hacker)

"Moses’ poems are elegant and complex, evoking an array of historical settings and shifting personae (from Chopin to Breughel to the hapless Mr. Nobody), often returning directly or obliquely to the poet’s affection for his father. By turns violent and witty, melancholy and thoughtful, He and I deserves a wide readership and high praise." 
— Kevin Prufer

Inge Pedersen
THE THIRTEENTH MONTH
(translated by Marilyn Nelson)

The Thirteenth Month introduces acclaimed Danish poet Inge Pedersen to English-speaking readers for the first time, in a volume of translations by the distinguished American poet/translator Marilyn Nelson. Spanning her career since 1982, The Thirteenth Month is an opportunity for a brand-new audience to appreciate the lyricism and realism of one of Europe's finest poets.

Benjamin Peret
FROM THE HIDDEN STOREHOUSE
(translated by Keith Hollaman)

Benjamin Peret is a poet like no other. One of the original group of Surrealists, he seceded from Dada in 1924 and remained faithful to Surrealist principles until his death in 1959. His irreverence and incandescent imagination remain fresh and funny, and they are perfectly captured in this inspired, idomatic translation.

Vasko Popa
HOMAGE TO THE LAME WOLF
(translated by Charles Simic)

Our first version of this selection from one of Eastern Europe's major figures sold out. The new version adds two sequences--"Give Me Back My Rags" and "Heaven's Ring"--as well as some previously unpublished sections of the justly famous series, "The Little Box." Simic and Popa are a perfect match. A book for surrealists, mythographers, postmodernists, scientists, and lovers of poetry and games

Rainer Maria Rilke
THE BOOK OF FRESH BEGINNINGS
(translated by David Young)

Rilke shows us how poetry made the transition from romanticism and symbolism into true modernism. This new selection, drawing primarily on his extremely rich middle period, the first decade of this century, and concluding with a selection from his late Sonnets to Orpheus, offers a clear, powerful, and contemporary Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke
THE UNKNOWN RILKE:
EXPANDED EDITION
(translated by Franz Wright)

Rilke's importance to the history of literature in the twentieth century is based on the power and memorability of his lyrics, and on his successful struggle to articulate a new vision of the human relation to the rest of creation.

Franz Wright's brilliant translations of some of Rilke's neglected poems are now well-known and admired. They are here enhanced by an additional selection and by a new introduction by the translator.

Yannis Ritsos
LATE INTO THE NIGHT
(translated by Martin McKinsey)

The last poems of this 20th-century Greek master are tinged with sadness and loss, but they also, in their candidly poetic reporting of the life and world around him, hum with vitality and an odd note of hope. Ritsos felt defeated in his own health and politics, but as a poet he experienced a surge of creativity that is fascinating to follow in its chronology and exactitude.

Marin Sorescu
HANDS BEHIND MY BACK
(translated by Gabriela Dragnea, Adriana Varga, & Stuart Friebert)

" If anybody, except a poet, were saying the things Sorescu says in his poems, he or she would be found insane. But this is what poetry should be doing, putting this kind of material into rational form."
--Russell Edson

Novica Tadic
NIGHT MAIL
(translated by Charles Simic)

"Bruno Schulz said: 'The sublime nature of the divine order...can be rendered only by the power of human negation.' He was speaking of Kafka's feel for the boundaries of the human and the divine. Tadic has the same feel. He composes anti-poems, anti-psalms, anti-prayers. Such complexity in poems that are almost exclusively very short! In my view, he is one of the most original and interesting poets today."
--Charles Simic

The best of new American poetry, in handsomely designed editions

Poetry from around the globe in extraordinary translations by some of our finest poets

Inventive anthologies for discriminating readers. Great for textbook adoption too.

Information about our annual poetry book contest.