The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats Review

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(More customer reviews)There isn't much question whether Yeats was a great poet, just where on the all time great list he falls. Whether you call him the greatest poet of the 20th century, or the greatest since Wordsworth, Milton or Shakespeare, his accomplishments are clear.
Beyond that, why should anyone buy this edition as opposed to any of the other available? First, the collected poems gives you a sense of his development and interests, not just the highlights of his greates poems. Second, and more importantly, this edition is well-annotated. The notes are thorough without being unduly interpretive--they tell you what an allusion refers to, not how it affects the meaning of the poem. The notes aim to be useful to any reader, regardless of background. As a result, western readers will come across odd sounding notes such as "Jesus Christ is the founder of Christianity" or "Hamlet is the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name." Still, you'll be thankful for such prosaic entries as they explain Irish myth and locate historical allusions. All in all, it's an edition that belongs on any poetry lover's shelf.

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100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Texas Pan American Series) (English and Spanish Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)I hate to rain on everyone's parade but Stephen Tapscott's translation of Pablo Neruda's evocative and beautiful poetry is crass, misleading and patronizing. It is an insult to the memory of a great poet and a disgrace to translation in general. I have read the collection several times and it angers me each time to see what this man has done to poetry that is subtle as it is open ended. Every single poem in this collection is manipulated my Mr. Tapscott. He constantly replaces words when perfect English equivalents are available. He changes the tenses in which the poems are written and inserts his own concepts when he deems necessary. Worst of all he "explains" the poems in his translation. Time and again Tapscott fails to see the beauty of an ambiguity intended by Neruda and procedes to write phrases that are one dimensional and often fail to convey even the basic core of the work. As to the sound and rythm of the collection, Tapscott goes out of his way to destroy the structure of the poems and their gentle flow. It is a shame that English speakers interested in Pablo Neruda's poetry have only this translation by which to judge his genius. Please save your money and wait for a translation that better represents these great poems.

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The Gift Review

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(More customer reviews)Hafiz has long been one of my favorite poets. I first discovered him when I was in college via Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I've been readng his poems ever since. Since I am (alas!) without Parsi, I'm unable to read Hafiz in the original, and must rely upon the kindness of translators.
Daniel Ladinsky has done an interesting job of rendering Hafiz's verse into English. Ladinsky has an ear for rhythm and he strikes me as an individual with deep spiritual sensibilities. When he renders one of Hafiz's couplets as "The body a tree./God a wind", one senses that there's more going into this translation than just philological expertise. Landinsky, like Hafiz, is a mystic.
That spiritual bond with Hafiz, as well as a shared joy in the sheer vitality of creation, makes Landinsky's renderings light-hearted, in the sense that they shimmer with what Hafiz would call God's Light. Some of my favorite examples: "Whenever/God lays His glance/Life starts/Clapping"; "What is the beginning of/Happiness?/It is to stop being/So religious"; "All the talents of God are within you./How could this be otherwise/When your soul/Derived from His/Genes!"
But while I can appreciate the lyrical way in which Ladinsky trys to express Hafiz's insights, I do wonder about the reliability of the translations. They're loaded with modernisms that are somewhat grating after a while: we're derived from God's "genes," the sun is "in drag," characters in the poems "dig potatoes," the soul visits a "summer camp." Moreover, many of the renderings make Hafiz sound suspiciously like a Zen master throwing out koans (an obvious example of this is the poem Ladinsky titles ""Two Giant Fat People".) To his credit, Landinsky freely admits in his translator's preface that he's "taken the liberty to play a few of [Hafiz's] lines through a late-night jazz sax instead of from a morning temple drum or lyre." But he's unapologetic, claiming that the translator's job is to help Hafiz's spirit "come across" to the Parsi-less reader, and that this demands a free rendering.
I'm not so sure. This attitude strikes me as rather patronizing to the reader and disloyal to Hafiz himself. So my bottom line is this: Ladinsky's book is a good read on both poetical and spiritual grounds. But I'm forever left in doubt as to whether I'm reading Ladinsky or Hafiz.

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Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems (Edición bilingüe) Review

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(More customer reviews)A MUST HAVE. Es sin duda un libro que vas a cuidar y conservar con mucho cariño. La recoleccion de poemas es brillante, exquisita, de primera. Quien no ha leido a Neruda? Lo bello del libro es que ofrece los poemas en el idioma que fueron escritos y en Ingles. La traduccion al ingles es excelente. No hay mucho que hablar sobre este libro, los poemas son una obra de arte y que esten a la vez traducidos al Ingles ya es mas que un buen regalo. No pienses dos veces en obtenerlo.

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In his long life as a poet, Pablo Neruda succeeded in becoming what many poets have aspired to but never achieved: a public voice, a voice not just for the people of his country but for his entire continent. Widely translated, he probably reached more readers than any poet in history; justly so, for, as he often said, his "poet's obligation" was to become a voice for all those who had no voice, an aspiration that stemmed from his long-time commitment to the communist faith. Born in 1904 in the rainy south of Chile, he enjoyed from an early age the luck of attention. One of his first books, Twenty Love Poems, became a bible for lovers in the Spanish language, and confirmed him in his poet's vocation. At the same time he pursued a lifelong career as a diplomat, serving in a series of consular posts in the Far East and Europe. In 1971, while serving as Chilean ambassador to France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In a famous essay, "On Impure Poetry," Neruda calls for "a poetry as impure as old clothes, as a body with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, and taxes."

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Collected Poems (Oxford India Collection) Review

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(More customer reviews)Nissim Ezekiel is often described as a founder of modern English verse in India, or as the leading writer to come out of the "Bene Israel" a long-isolated Jewish community in Western India. This is not really fair to a highly readable modern poet with affinities to Yeats, W.C. Williams, and others, although Ezekiel also wrote poems in an Indo-English dialect that anticipate the prose works of Salman Rushdie.

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This new edition of Nissim Ezekiel's Collected Poems comes with a critical introduction reevaluating Ezeikiel's place in the modernist canon by John Thieme, and a preface by Leela Gandhi.

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