From Booklist
Bly, always forceful and clarifying, recalls the astonishment and gratitude he felt when he first read the work of contemporary European and South American poets in the 1950s. He soon set himself the task of translating the poets who spoke most resonantly to his soul, thus discovering the immense joys and challenges of the art of translation. Over the years, Bly extended his inspired efforts to include Horace, poets of India and Persia, Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, and beyond, and he now gathers together selected translations of poets remarkable for their exaltation and outrage, spirituality and rebelliousness, lyricism and compassion. Bly introduces the poets with incandescent interpretations of their work and summaries of their lives, heightening the enjoyment of the poems that follow, including works by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer; Norwegian poets Olav H. Hauge, Rolph Jacobsen, and Harry Martinson; a sixteenth-century Indian ecstatic and radical, a woman named Mirabai; and George Trakl, Antonio Machado, and Juan Ramon Jimenez. The result is an exceptionally spirited international collection of artful and passionate translations.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Product Description
The astonishing collection of the translations Robert Bly has been producing for more than fifty years, introducing foreign poets to American readers for the first time.
Robert Bly has always been amazingly prescient in his choice of poets to translate. The poetry he selected supplied qualities that seemed lacking from the literary culture of this country. At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Bly introduced Neruda, Vallejo, Trakl, Jiménez, Traströmer, and Rumi. His most recent translations include Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, and the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two renowned and lesser-known poets from around the world are brought together. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly "is one of the leaders of a poetic revival that has returned American literature to the world community."
