The Prophecies - Tapa dura

Everybody knows about Nostradamus, but few have read him. Richard Sieburth's glittering translation rescues one of the world's most arcane texts from the realm of hearsay, and renders its strange poetry palpable and moving (John Ashbery, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet)

Freshly translated [and] stamped with the approval of the editors of the venerable Penguin Classics series ... this new dual-language edition of The Prophecies, translated by the excellent Richard Sieburth, makes a case for Nostradamus as a poet of sweep and impact ... Never mind the Weather Channel. If the Penguin Classics people are telling me to be afraid, then I am prepared to be very afraid indeed (Dwight Garner New York Times)

A rigorous, wry, alert new translation ... [It] offers English readers the experience of reading the [prophecies] steadily and sequentially, rather than piecemeal, and with the original French on facing pages, making it possible to read the prophecies as acts of writing rather than riddles ... A richer, more wrangling read than any other English translator has managed or even attempted. Sieburth is particularly responsive to the sudden shifts of scale which are a feature of Nostradamus's writing ... In keeping with the strangeness of these verses Sieburth has succeeded brilliantly in making them at last readable, in all their weird, cruel beauty, their jagged brilliance and spasmodic dash (Steven Connor London Review of Books)