Swan isle press us (82 resultados)

Paperback. Condición: New.

Paperback. Condición: New. New edition, and Enlarged. Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jimenez brings together the elements of perfect work, both in writing and in other realms. Among these elements - the wellsprings of any kind of creation - are instinct and inspiration, memory and forgetting, silence and noise, love and regret. A treasure for poets and writers, "The Complete Perfectionist" includes helpful commentary by noted translator Christopher Maurer and shows perfection to be a process of "becoming" rather than an end product. In these insightful pages, a poet haunted by perfection reveals his methods of writing and revision, and measures the social and ethical dimensions of el trabajo gustoso, or pleasurable work. This revised and expanded edition includes many aphorisms recently published in Spanish and not previously included. …

Paperback. Condición: New. New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.   This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the "red midnight sun" of hope. Belli's contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its "azure cloister."    Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli's original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.…

Paperback. Condición: New. New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.   This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the "red midnight sun" of hope. Belli's contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its "azure cloister."    Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli's original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A splash of sea foam. A sly sparrow. A man dodging the rain. From such mundane, unexpected moments, Spanish poet Claudio Rodriguez crafted his 1965 Alliance and Condemnation, a collection of poems that temper the joy of existence - the "bounty that turns my flawed breath into prayer" - with a questioning of empirical reality. In these pages are poems of love and hate, contrition and forgiveness, and the joys of sorrow and existence. Many of the poems are essentially parables that seem to address the immediacy of the world yet point beyond it toward philosophical and eternal values. The result is a conjoining of the real and the ideal, a frequent theme in Spanish literature. Many of these poems bridge the distance between the Spanish mystics, among them Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa, and the nature poetry of romanticism. Of all his creations, the radiant poems in "Alliance and Condemnation" offer the best imaginable introduction to his extraordinary life and work.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Bilingual edition. Peruvian poet Luis Hernandez is legendary in his native country. Even as he was haunted by addiction and spent periodic time in rehabilitation centers, Hernandez was exceptionally gifted in his youth, publishing three books of poetry by the time he was twenty-four. He did not publish another book before his untimely death at thirty-six, but he was not silent-he filled notebooks with poems, musical notations, quotes, translations, musings, newspaper clippings, and drawings. Derived from these notebooks, The School of Solitude is the first book of Hernandez's poetry in English. The haunting voice of Hernandez evokes an irrevocably distant past, with the poems contemplating happiness and joy, love and fulfillment, yet always with a sense of sadness, solitude, and dream. Including rare images from Hernandez's notebooks, as well as several poems never before published in any language, The School of Solitude will be read not only for its powerful poetry and imagery, but also as a means to learn more about this enigmatic Latin American poet and the mystery of his life and work.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life. Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters, snapshots, and vignettes, this collection of quick-witted poems and short fiction mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than a festival of masks and self-invention. At the center of Borinsky's work are the cities, which are a masquerade of disaster and spectacle that moves through space and time. Within these cities reside a woman who hides her face so that she may be better seen, cheating lovers who betray only to end up entwined in a tango, and immigrants who borrow one another's accents. Filled with energy and irreverence, Lost Cities Go to Paradise captures the indignities and excitement of living among others in a society and discovering what is valued-and all that is not. …

Paperback. Condición: New. Elegant prose and imaginative ironies bring these compelling short stories to life in this first English-language collection from Mexican author Roberto Ransom. Each of the ten stories is filled with fascinating, yet enigmatic and sometimes elusive characters: an alligator in a bathtub, an invisible toad who appears only to a young boy, the beautiful redheaded daughter of a mushroom collector, a deceased journalist who communicates in code, and even Leonardo Da Vinci himself, meditating on The Last Supper. One of Mexico's most original writers, Ransom explores these characters' emotional depths as they move through their fantastical worlds that, while at times unfamiliar, offer brave and profound insights into our own. Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists is the follow-up to Ransom's highly acclaimed A Tale of Two Lions, praised by Ignacio Padilla as "the best Mexican literary work I have read in recent years.[It] heralds a pen capable of that rarest of privileges in our letters: attaining the comic and profoundly human through a perfect simplicity." This collection of short stories has been translated with great care by Daniel Shapiro.…

Paperback. Condición: New. I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean. So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jews after the Alhambra Decree, which ordered their expulsion from Spain. Inspired by her own journey to Salonika and the Greek Islands, Rhodes, Crete, as well as the Balkans, Marjorie Agosin searches for the remnants of the Sepharad. Presented in a beautiful bilingual Spanish-English edition, Agosin's poems speak to a wandering life of exile on distant shores. We hear the rhythm of the waves and the Ladino-inflected voices of Sephardi women past and present: Paloma, Estrella, and Luna in the fullness of their lives, loves, dreams, and faith. An evocative and sensual voyage to communities mostly lost after the Holocaust, The White Islands offers a lighthouse of remembrance, a lyrical world recovered with language and song, lament and joy, longing and hope.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Bilingual edition. A powerful account of the symbolic murder of the poet's mother. From the first poem in this bilingual edition of The Men Who Killed My Mother, it is evident that the mother in "Our Mother" ("Nuestra Madre") is not only Fernando Valverde's. The soulful refrain of "mother/madre" might be anyone's mother whose suffering is palpable in a world legislated over by men. Issues such as orphanhood, abuse, violence, manipulation, and fear are treated with the rawness of someone who has tasted the venom of betrayal. This is a lyrical dark garden of faith and family, exposing treachery and cruelty, and anger at injustice, from the voice of a son with deep love for his mother-for her honor, dignity, and dreams.  Valverde leads us into a forest full of wolves and serpents under the governance of civil society. He has received many awards for his poetry and is recognized as one of the most highly acclaimed poets of his generation in Spain. This heartfelt English translation by Gordon E. McNeer captures the power of Valverde's poetic cadences and its haunting evocative lyricism.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Moving between the speech and silence of a woman struggling to speak freely, Ruth Behar embarks on a poetic voyage into her own vulnerability and the sacrifices of her exiled ancestors as she tries to understand love, loss, regret, and the things we keep and carry with us. Behar's vivid renderings of wilted gardens, crashing waves, and firefly-lit nights recall the imagery of her inspiration, Dulce María Loynaz, who is often known as the Cuban Emily Dickinson. Presented in a beautiful bilingual English-Spanish edition-Behar serves as her own translator-Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé will haunt readers with the cries and whispers which illuminate the human spirit and the spectrum of emotions that make for a life and lives well-remembered. Estévez, Rolando (ilustrador). …

Paperback. Condición: New. A mother and son's fictional journey to escape the Armenian Genocide and start anew.  Like any other fifteen-year-old boy, Aram might never have written the events of his still young life, except that he found himself suddenly plunged into exile, fleeing certain death. In 1915, the Ottoman authorities undertook the wholesale extermination of the Armenian people; hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children like Aram suffered one of the twentieth century's most savage persecutions. Inspired by the plight of the murdered modernist poet Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915), this novel follows Aram and his widowed mother on their flight toward a new life on-and under-the sea. From recollections of his father's meditations on Homer to a life-changing apprenticeship as a coral fisherman off the coasts of Cataluña and Marseille, Aram's tale dives into a future that might help redeem a harrowing past. Aram's Notebook examines the Armenian Genocide through a narrative in which poets and poetry loom large. Aram's tale evokes a struggle not simply for physical survival, but for saving memory from the clutches of destruction. Evocatively translated from the original Catalan by Ara Merjian.…

Paperback. Condición: New. William Carlos Williams's "lost" translation of Luis Rechani Agrait's masterpiece. William Carlos Williams's passion for his matrilineal Puerto Rican roots led him to visit Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941. There at a writers' conference, he befriended the playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, who gave him his play Mi señoría, staged to acclaim the previous year. My Excellency, as Williams calls the play in his translation, is a political farce set in an "imaginary country" that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, with its high unemployment and labor unrest. The play focuses on the plight of an idealistic but naive man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a completely corrupt political system. Through an unscrupulous election, he becomes the nation's leader. The play is successful as a satire largely because of Buenaventura's hilarious language-recreated by Williams-with its pompous style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. The play's very title is a laughable malapropism. My Excellency shows the corrupting power of success and the tragic flaw of materialism. Driving the comedy in Williams's translation is his firm command of the play's dialogue interwoven with popular idioms in which the charm of pure nonsense abounds. This edition is Luis Rechani Agrait's debut as a playwright in English.…

Hardback. Condición: New. In these intimate pages, award-winning Catalan poet Joan Margarit offers a passionate defense of poetry and of the intelligible poem - the well-made text that can provide refuge, wisdom, and consolation. Inspired by Rilke's classic "Letters to a Young Poet", this slender volume explores poetry as vocation, obsession, and partnership between writer and reader, a 'road toward inner growth'. For Margarit, poetry promises 'a clarity that allows us mysteriously to live without the need to forget'. This is essential reading for poets young and old, writers, and readers seeking insights into the creative process and 'the way both poet and reader can find their own way to face solitude'.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Victor Hugo spent years in political exile off the coast of Normandy. While there, he produced his masterpiece, Les Miserables--but that wasn't all: he also wrote a book-length poem, La Fin de Satan, left unfinished and not published until after his death. Satan and his Daughter, the Angel Liberty, drawn from this larger poem, tells the story of Satan and his daughter, the angel created by God from a feather left behind following his banishment. Hugo details Satan's fall, and through a despairing soliloquy, reveals him intent on revenge, yet desiring God's forgiveness. The angel Liberty, meanwhile, is presented by Hugo as the embodiment of good, working to convince her father to return to Heaven. This new translation by Richard Skinner presents Hugo's verse in his preferred style, and is accompanied by illustrations by the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon. No adventurous reader will want to miss this beautiful mingling of the epic and familial, religious and political. Redon, Odilon (ilustrador).…

Paperback. Condición: New. A comic and melancholy novel about translation and living between cultures, set during one historic day in Spain: February 21, 1981, the attempted coup against the newborn Spanish democracy.Early one morning in 1981, Peter Carp, an American poet and translator living in Granada, wakes to the sounds of shouting and the revving of a motorcycle. These interruptions to Peter's sleep provoke a series of interrelated thoughts, delivered with wry humor, about personal relations in Spain, gossip, the role of women in a patriarchal society, and the after-effects of expelling the Jewish population from Spain in 1492. We are introduced to Peter's associative view of the world as he draws on a lifetime of reading poetry, of making sense of his own Jewish sensibility, and how it relates to the cultural history of the Spain he has come to love for its music, people, food, and language. Peter lives in the home of Alberto, a professor of translation, who was once jailed under Franco's regime. He has fallen in love with Ana, a young woman who is exploring the new freedoms of post-Franco Spain. Years ago, he had befriended flamenco singers of the Roma community, and his current task is to translate the flamenco lyrics he has collected, a process that challenges his understanding of Spanish and the capacity of language to convey meaning. His day brings him into contact with a wide range of Spaniards, including a gardener at the Alhambra, a group of children playing in the street, a professional beggar, a diverse range of personalities at a neighborhood bar before the midday dinner, and in the evening, a small band of fascist sympathizers encouraged by the attempted coup now taking place in the Spanish parliament.With prose that mixes social observation, linguistic conjecture, and vivid description, Paul Hecht examines how living is itself a form of translation when moving from one language or culture to another, and how history can erupt into our own world. In Send Down Einstein, Hecht creates a tension between what we dream will happen and what actually does happen. In this bouillabaisse of emotion, the reader will taste how, for Peter Carp-with the right food and the best company-dreams, hope, and words can matter.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Bilingual. Illuminates the place of music in the life and poetry of Federico García Lorca."Yo ante todo, soy músico," Federico García Lorca once remarked: "Before all else, I am a musician." Whether seated at the piano, collecting folksongs on his travels through Spain, or composing music for his plays, few poets have lived music so deeply. For Lorca, songs were "living creatures." How a City Sings from November to November: Lorca on Music brings together for the first time in English the poet's writing on music and musicians. In these pages, through lectures, letters, and interviews, Lorca celebrates the musical seasons of Granada, "a city enclosed by mountains and made for music"; the sources of cante jondo (flamenco deep song); the haunting melodies of Spanish cradle songs; and the dance of La Argentina. He describes learning the guitar, staging Spanish ballads in Buenos Aires, and listening to spirituals in New York. In bed with a fever, he compares it to a "delicate tempo rubato of Chopin." Based on recent archival research, edited and newly translated by noted Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer, this collection offers an intricate and enjoyable counterpoint to Lorca's poetry and theater.…

Hardback. Condición: New. "One day you're going to ask me, 'Mama, do you remember that trip to Salto?' and I don't want such questions to go unanswered." What happens on that trip to Salto opens this moving narrative by Uruguayan writer and poet Circe Maia. It begins with a mother and her young daughter desperately trying to catch an overnight train to Salto that they hope carries their husband and father, a physician and political prisoner who is traveling to the Salto prison accompanied by military guards after being interrogated in Montevideo. Their ensuing trip reveals the effects of a totalitarian regime on families and social relationships. The tale of their journey is followed by a series of diary entries written by the mother between 1972 and 1974. The diary complements the opening account as each entry sensitively chronicles the family's struggle to cope with daily life under prolonged separation, fear, and uncertainty. The diarist questions how one's sense of community and love for country change when basic human rights can no longer be taken for granted.Presented here in a bilingual edition, A Trip to Salto ultimately provides an intimate glimpse into Uruguayan history while it explores the deeper truths about an individual's capacity to resist, adapt, and hope.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A lyrical novel following an idealistic student who explores the power of literature in Franco's Spain.   It's the summer of 1963 and León Egea, a cocky nineteen-year-old student and aspiring author, has just finished his first year studying literature at the University of Granada and is starting a summer job as an encyclopedia salesman. León, infuriated by the injustices in Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship, comes to find that literature can speak the truth when the reality is clouded.    In this coming-of-age novel by renowned Spanish writer Luis García Montero, León discovers that, under the repressive Franco dictatorship, people, places, and events are not always what they seem. But literature, words, and names open paths to discovery, both personal and political. Through lyrical fast-paced narrative, Someone Speaks Your Name explores literature as a foundation for understanding human relationships, national character, discrete differences between right and wrong, and for pursuing the path forward. As León's professor tells him: "Learning to write is learning to see.".…

Hardback. Condición: New. 'He was named Jorge, like me, and for this his life hurts me twice.' So writes Jorge Volpi in this highly original novel that presents a biographical perspective on the tragic life of the poet and chemist Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta was one of the founders of Los Contemporaneos, an influential twentieth-century literary movement. The poetic voice of Cuesta's verses can be heard throughout, offering insights into the creative and destructive forces and impulses in his work that eventually led to a mental ward - and a shocking suicide at thirty-eight. The fictional 'Jorge', as narrator, embarks on an obsessive quest to understand the life of the long-dead poet, with the distance between subject and researcher blurring as he finds himself struggling to understand his own life. It is a brave search for anyone willing to gaze into the mirror of mortality 'in spite of the dark silence.'. …

Hardback. Condición: New. Spanish filmmaker, Luis Bunuel (1900-83) was an artist known for his surrealist imagery and unflinching social criticism. An exile who produced some of his most famous work in Mexico and France during Franco's dictatorship, he left a complicated imprint on the creative landscape of the twentieth century and on generations of younger filmmakers - including his friend Claudio Isaac. Drawn from Isaac's personal papers, "Midday with Bunuel: Memories and Sketches", 1973-1983 is an intimate and unconventional portrait of this cinematic icon - and a memoir of Isaac's own artistic development. The text includes sketches, vignettes, and anecdotes from Isaac's notebooks, revealing his perspective first as a precocious boy and then as a young man. Isaac reflects on Bunuel's presence among a community of exiles, artists, actors, writers, and intellectuals in Mexico City. These are at once touching, perceptive, and critical glimpses into Bunuel's roles as husband and father, friend and colleague, surrealist, philosopher, and iconoclast during his last years. Throughout, Isaac's words reveal his deep admiration and affection for an older friend full of contradictions.Intimate photographs from the Isaac family archive complement the writing, and Bryan T. Scoular's careful translation makes this text available for the first time in English. Part biography, part memoir, "Midday with Bunuel" brings to life the creative milieu of Mexico City and gives readers a privileged view of the relationship between these two filmmakers.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Bilingual edition. A new translation of Federico García Lorca's captivating lecture on duende. For years, Federico García Lorca's lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman.Duende: Play and Theory not only provides a path into Lorca's poetics and the arts of Spain; it is one of the strangest, most compelling accounts of inspiration ever offered by a poet. Contrasting the demon called duende with the Angel and the Muse, Lorca describes a mysterious telluric, diabolical current, an irreducible "it," that can draw the best from both performer and audience. This new translation by Christopher Maurer, based on a thoroughly revised edition of the Spanish original of 1933, also included in this volume, offers a more accurate and fully annotated version of the lecture, with an introduction by eminent philologist José Javier León. Drawing on a deep knowledge of flamenco, and correcting decades of discussion about duende and its supposed origins in Spanish folklore and popular speech, León shows to what extent the concept of duende-understood as the imp of artistic inspiration-was the playful, yet deadly serious, invention of Lorca himself. Lorca's bravura performance of duende is foreshadowed here with a bilingual version-the most complete ever-of his other major text on inspiration, "Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion," in which he calls for greater freedom in poetry as if searching for duende and its "constant baptism of newly created things.".…

Paperback. Condición: New. A powerful historical novel set in Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "In Malambo . . . the Rimac proudly rubs elbows with the freedmen, the cimarrons, and smuggled slaves. . . It runs united to the other subterranean springs underneath Blanket Street, Weavers Lane, and under Jewish Street . . . and Swordmaker's Lanes." The Rimac shapes the narrative of this compelling historical novel that probes the brutal clash of ethnicity, religion, and class in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru. Set against the backdrop of Spanish colonialism and the Spanish Inquisition in the "New World," Malambo peels back the layers of Peru's society to focus on the subtle connections among indigenous peoples- Africans, Jews, Christians, and others-whose cultural fusion pervades Latin American history and culture. At the heart of the novel is Tomason, an African artist living along the Rimac who paints religious murals for the church and his colonial masters. The intermingling of his Yoruba heritage with his life in a Spanish colony transforms him into a griot figure who unearths the deeper truths of his painful and complex experience by sharing it. Other memorable characters' stories intertwine with Tomason's tale, developing a narrative that powerfully reflects on the themes of dislocation and enslavement.Malambo is an unforgettable work that explores the origins of the Afro-Hispanic experience and offers a profound meditation on the forces of history. …

Hardback. Condición: New. First Edition, 1st Edition. With this highly original collection of short stories, Catalonian writer Jaume Cabre takes his place among the masters of the form. In "Winter Journey", the reader encounters disparate and often desperate characters - pianist, cuckold, whore, organ builder, rabbi, priest, scholar, thief, hitman, madman, Holocaust survivor, oligarch, failed artist - who challenge notions about will, morality, and the riddle of existence. This is not a selection of individual stories, but a singularly brilliant and enigmatic narrative, novelistic in its approach, with mysterious connections linking characters, objects, and ideas across time and place. The text takes the form of a Schubertian musical progression in prose, a philosophical mystery moving freely through a labyrinth of centuries and cities, historical and contemporary. Richly allusive with its themes and motifs of music and art, "Winter Journey" will continue to provoke questions long after the reader has closed the book. This edition represents the first translation of Cabre's work into English and an invitation to many more readers to come along for the ride. …

Paperback. Condición: New. New edition. The first major English translation of the final book in the expansive and essential "Celia" series by Elena Fortún. Set during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Celia in the Revolution is the last in a series of young adult novels written by Encarnación Aragoneses, known by the pen name Elena Fortún, one of the most prolific and popular Spanish authors of the mid-twentieth century. In a series of more than twenty novels, Fortún's protagonist is Celia Gálvez de Montalbán, a precocious and rebellious girl from an affluent family who's not afraid to question authority and dream, and that often gets her into trouble. Readers watch her grow from age seven through adolescence to the threshold of womanhood at seventeen, which is her age in this dark, inspiring novel about the war that changed Spain. In this last narrative in the legendary series, Celia has an awakening that not even her lively imagination could have anticipated. The once carefree, innocent child prone to playful fantasies must suddenly confront a world that's utterly changed, finding herself amid a bloody conflict, la Guerra Civil. Celia, now a madrecita, a little mother to her two younger sisters since the death of their mother, is forced into a life of hardship, a world of hunger, witness to violence, executions, bombing raids, and death. With Celia's sorrows come her courageous and profound compassion, consoling and caring for virtually every war victim that crosses her path, no matter their political inclinations, and no matter all that Celia must contend with herself. Celia, despite all her travails, manages to survive with determination, defiance, and dignity. Written immediately after the war, Celia in the Revolution was not published during Elena Fortún's lifetime, until after the death of the dictator, Francisco Franco, due to censorship. This first major English translation by eminent scholar and Hispanist Michael Ugarte captures the narrative and nuances of Celia's voice and others in this character-rich novel, and fellow eminent scholar and Hispanist Nuria Capdevila-Arguëlles's preface brings powerful insights into this remarkable work by Elena Fortún that transcends young adult literature.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "To love is to act"- "Aimer, c'est agir."  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life's philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people-especially the poor and wretched-drove him not only to write his epic Les Misérables but also to follow his conscience. We have much to learn from Hugo, who battled for justice, lobbied against slavery and the death penalty, and fought for the rights of women and children. In a series of essays that interweave Hugo's life with Les Misérables and point to the novel's contemporary relevance, To Love Is to Act explores how Hugo reveals his guiding principles for life, including his belief in the redemptive power of love and forgiveness. Enriching the book are insights from artists who captured the novel's heart in the famed musical, Les Mis creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg,  producer of the musical Les Misérables Cameron Mackintosh, film director Tom Hooper, and award-winning actors who have portrayed Jean Valjean: Colm Wilkinson and Hugh Jackman.…

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Hardback. Condición: New. Appearing for the first time outside of Cuba, this bold collection of short stories provides an intimate and critical view of Afro-Cuba. Ines Maria Martiatu's stories - presented here in the original Spanish, with facing-page English translations - span postcolonial Cuba of the early twentieth century, the First Republic, the 'victorious revolution,' and contemporary life in the streets of Havana.Taking real risks as an Afro-Cubana, Martiatu confronts conflicts about identity, race, marginalization, and discrimination. The history of the Caribbean, as part of the African diaspora, is reflected in the textures of life in Cuba, its music, rituals and myths, the Church and Santeria, past and present. While race is unquestionably fundamental to the stories, they are at the same time rooted in the universality of the human experience. The vantage is that of an unflinching, yet compassionate observer of society - one who simultaneously turns an introspective mirror on the complicated layers of self.…

Hardback. Condición: New. Tango and fairy tales mix freely in this seductive, irreverent, and sensual collection of poems. From a city that is at once Buenos Aires and all other cities, Alicia Borinsky brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best friends, sworn enemies, torturers, vamps, cheats, and lovers - a gallery of characters who wink and boldly gaze back at us. Vignettes become poems and poems become vignettes, reflections that dance, reveal, conceal, enchant, confess, and dream."Frivolous Women" invites us to visit the darker and lighter sides of laughter and love and feel the tenderness of recovered memories as we cross the bridges of relationships and stroll down the mysterious streets of childhood. Alicia Borinsky reminds us that the revelations of poetry are always intimate and dangerous. Cola Franzen's agile and insightful translation, crafted in close collaboration with the poet, is faithful to the letter and spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition. …

Hardback. Condición: New. Bilingual edition. Marjorie Agosin's intensely personal long poem "The Light of Desire" is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the "Song of Songs" and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in "The Light of Desire" is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers' bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and mantle of stars, all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal. The poem was written over a four-year span in Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim neighborhood, overlooking the wall of the Second Temple, and these hallowed surroundings imbue Agosin's poetic voice. Lori Marie Carlson's sensitive translation maintains the spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.…