The Siren and the Seashell

The Siren and the Seashell
Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0292753470

Octavio Paz has long been known for his brilliant essays as well as for his poetry. Through the essays, he has sought to confront the tensions inherent in the conflict between art and society and to achieve a unity of their polarities. The Siren and the Seashell is a collection of Paz’s essays, focusing on individual poets and on poetry in general. The first five poets he treats are Latin American: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, Ramón López Velarde, and Alfonso Reyes. Then there are essays on Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, Saint-John Perse, Antonio Machado, and Jorge Guillén. Finally, there are Paz’s reflections on the poetry of solitude and communion and the literature of Latin America. Each essay is more than Paz’s impressions of one person or issue; each is the occasion for a wider discussion of cultural, historical, psychological, and philosophical themes. The essays were selected from Paz’s writing between 1942 and 1965 and provide an overview of the development of his thinking and an exploration of the ideas central in his works.

Love Poems by Pedro Salinas

Love Poems by Pedro Salinas
Author: Pedro Salinas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2010-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0226734269

When Pedro Salinas’s 1933 collection of love poems, La voz a ti debida, was introduced to American audiences in Willis Barnstone’s 1975 English translation, it was widely regarded as the greatest sequence of love poems written by a man or a woman, in any language, in the twentieth century. Now, seventy-five years after its publication, the reputation of the poems and its multifaceted writer remains untarnished. A portrait of their era, the poems, from a writer in exile from his native civil war–torn Spain, now reemerge in our time. In this new, facing-page bilingual edition, Barnstone has added thirty-six poems written in the form of letters from Salinas to his great love, Katherine Whitmore. Discovered years later, these poems were written during and after the composition of La voz and, though disguised as prose, have all the rhythms and sounds of lineated lyric poetry. Taken together, the poems and letters are a history, a dramatic monologue, and a crushing and inevitable ending to the story of a man consumed by his love and his art. Bolstered by an elegant foreword by Salinas’s contemporary, the poet Jorge Guillén, and a masterly afterword by the Salinas scholar, Enric Bou, that considers the poet and his legacy for twenty-first century world poetry, Love Poems by Pedro Salinas will be cause for celebration throughout the world of verse and beyond.

Human Forms

Human Forms
Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691194181

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul. The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry
Author: Ilan Stavans
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2012-03-27
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374533180

Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.

Lectures on Dostoevsky

Lectures on Dostoevsky
Author: Joseph Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2019-12-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691178968

Poor Folk -- The Double -- The House of the Dead -- Notes from Underground -- Crime and Punishment -- The Idiot -- The Brothers Karamazov -- Appendix I: Selected Film Adaptations of Dostoevsky's Novels -- Appendix II: "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace.

The Poetics of Self-consciousness

The Poetics of Self-consciousness
Author: Jonathan Mayhew
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1994
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838752562

"Twentieth-century poetry engages in a highly self-conscious meditation on the nature of poetic language. Spanish poetry, however, has sometimes been considered an exception to this tendency. This book, with its focus on linguistic self-reflexivity, refutes the notion that major Spanish poets such as Jorge Guillen and Vicente Aleixandre are theoretically naive creators. In a series of nuanced readings, Jonathan Mayhew demonstrates the extent to which modern Spanish poets are conscious of their linguistic medium." "Previous books on Spanish poetry published in English have been more limited in scope, usually including poets of a single "generation." The Poetics of Self-Consciousness is the first to study well-known writers of the earlier part of the century along with more recent poets such as Jose Angel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Jose Maria Alvarez, and Juan Lamillar. Interpreting poetic texts written from the 1920s through the 1980s, Mayhew is able to trace the evolving function of literary self-consciousness in Spanish poetry while remaining attentive to the differences among writers of the same historical moment. The modernist poets of the earlier part of the century are preoccupied by the problem of literary mimesis: the representation of reality through language. In the postwar years, poets turned their attention to the social and ethical dimensions of poetic language. The postmodernists of more recent decades, finally, are increasingly concerned with their own belatedness with respect to cultural traditions of the past." "Critics hailed Jonathan Mayhew's first book, Claudio Rodriguez and the Language of Poetic vision, as an "enlightening and timely book on perhaps Spain's greatest living poet," and "a signal first effort from a critic with high scholarly standards and a penetrating insight into contemporary poetry." With The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry, readers will discover another probing study of other modern and postmodern Spanish poets."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

My Voice Because of You

My Voice Because of You
Author: Pedro Salinas
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1976-06-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1438418531

The Spanish poet Pedro Salinas is a member of that group of brilliant and original poets called the Generation of '27, a group which includes Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, Vincente Aleixandre, and Frederico García Lorca. First published as La voz a ti debida in Madrid in 1933, Salinas' sequence of seventy poems is his most famous work, and is thought by many to be the best book of love poetry written in this century. Willis Barnstone's translation makes it available as a whole for the first time in English. As part of Spain's vanguard movement, Salinas believed in reviving elements from earlier eras, as is demonstrated by a title such as Razón de amor (from the medieval Sermon of Love), as well as Largo Lamento and La voz a ti debida (from the Renaissance poet Garcilaso de la Vega). Salinas shows a natural affinity with the intricate objectivity of the baroque poet Góngora, and continues the Spanish mystical tradition while reaching the metaphysical through human love. And though he learned much from earlier eras, he is also very much of this century, as is seen in his imagery of typewriters, telephones, and car radiators, all deftly handled through a variety of poetic moods. In fact, few modern poets have so discerningly employed the external data of our experience as transformed though the emotions and imagination. For Salinas "Telegraph wires carry kisses." He is by turns playful, ironic, sentimental, and despairing, leading us through love's sense of amazement, humor, tragedy. Salinas' confessional persona speaks with extraordinary power, and the poems operate both individually and cumulatively. Willis Barnstone's translation captures the changing tones of the poet's internal journey, giving us a deep sense of the variety and poignancy found in the original. My Voice Because of You has been accepted in UNESCO's series of translations of European literature.

On Poets and Others

On Poets and Others
Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: Skyhorse
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1628723920

The Nobel Prize–winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and Henri Michaux. Paz writes, “I believe that a writer’s attitude to language should be that of a lover: fidelity and, at the same time, a lack of respect for the beloved object. Veneration and transgression.” When this original thinker meets these writers, each essay is an adventure of the mind.

The Whole Island

The Whole Island
Author: Mark Weiss
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2009-11-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0520944534

Cuba's cultural influence throughout the Western Hemisphere, and especially in the United States, has been disproportionally large for so small a country. This landmark volume is the first comprehensive overview of poetry written over the past sixty years. Presented in a beautiful Spanish-English en face edition, The Whole Island makes available the astonishing achievement of a wide range of Cuban poets, including such well-known figures as Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and Nancy Morejón, but also poets widely read in Spanish who remain almost unknown to the English-speaking world—among them Fina García Marruz, José Kozer, Raúl Hernández Novás, and Ángel Escobar—and poets born since the Revolution, like Rogelio Saunders, Omar Pérez, Alessandra Molina, and Javier Marimón. The translations, almost all of them new, convey the intensity and beauty of the accompanying Spanish originals. With their work deeply rooted in Cuban culture, many of these poets—both on and off the island—have been at the center of the political and social changes of this tempestuous period. The poems offered here constitute an essential source for understanding the literature and culture of Cuba, its diaspora, and the Caribbean at large, and provide an unparalleled perspective on what it means to be Cuban.