Weinberger, Eliot

Average customer rating:

What a great and most interesting writer
Something for everyone and some things for no one
not for the weak of mind
Mandarin
Something for everyone

Borges: Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Latin American | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Caribbean & Latin American | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Borges: Collected Fictions
Borges: Selected Poems
The Book of Imaginary Beings (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook)
Everything & Nothing

ASIN: 0140290117
Release Date: 2000-10-31

Amazon.com

Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side.

Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "The Nothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling with the self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There are many such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (in which Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of the eternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see the author venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges on King Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as The Petrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, his critiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobody should miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety and mind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be a little forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meets the specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literary pleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but it does. --James Marcus

Book Description

This unique volume presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers: his extraordinary non--fiction prose. Borges' unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his essays, reviews, lectures, and political and cultural notes, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen; Shakespeare and the Kabbalah; the history of angels and the history of the tango; the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism
Chosen International Book of the Year by George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement

Customer Reviews:

What a great and most interesting writer .......2006-05-08

Eliot Weinberger has done a real service to the world of literature by selecting, and translating these pieces. They show the range of interest, the incredible ability to make inventive creative cross- connections of one of Modern Literature's true masters, Borges.
Borges covers worlds in his writing, worlds of Literature , worlds of the Argentinean society he and some of his ancestors grew up in, worlds given in a universal encycopediac reading, which seems to cover all continents and all cultures.
Borges greatest work is considered to be his ' Ficciones'. But his signature is present in all , in a single page of a book- review or a philosphical meditation.
For him worlds mingle and combine, and are retranslated in such a way as to reappear as Literature.
He also in this work reveals himself to be a decent and courageous opponent of Fascism.
He confounds and surprises us at times with these strange mixings of things, but the poetic and parable- like element is so strong in this work that it engages us, and forces us to question our own small pictures of reality.
What a great and interesting writer. What a pleasure to have this work to enrich our minds with.

Something for everyone and some things for no one.......2005-08-11

Because Borges lived and worked in Argentina, few have heard of him in the English-speaking world. Those that have are probably most familiar with his fiction stories. This book of non-fiction essays shows the vast knowledge and wide variation of interests of Borges. Therefore, this collection really does have something for everyone. Unfortunately, there are also many essays that are unreadable, some annoying repititions, and some essays are just plain dull.

So, what does Borges write about? He covers some metaphysical ground on the nature of time and infinity. He defines heaven as an infinite library, and then goes into the nature of infinity. On the more mundane end, he reviews movies and gives capsule biographies of authors - King Kong, Citizen Kane, and more obscure (and not necessarily Hollywood) films. He writes on contemporary (at the time) politics - Nazi Germany, the curators of the national library, etc. He gets intensely personal - there is one essay on the progression of his blindness. But if there is a main theme that permeates these pieces, it's his love of literature in all languages - Spanish, English (old and modern), German. He has an abiding love of the Greek classics (Homer, Virgil) and great admiration for Joyce, Poe, and Chesterton.

Unfortunately, those of us with a less classical education cannot keep up to everything that Borges says - I, for one, will never have the time to learn ancient Greek! - which makes certain essays difficult. There are other essays (especially early on) that are simply unintellegible (this may be the fault of the translators, especially since there are times when two or three essays cover the same ground with increasing degrees of murkiness). But it always happened that a real gem would appear just when I was getting frustrated with a series of uninteresting essays.

On the balance, about a third of the essays are not interesting (or badly translated, or repetitions), a third are interesting if not spectacular, and the final third have at least one moment of sheer brilliance. It's well worth buying, but it's unlikely you'll read it from cover to cover without taking a break - I took many breaks to read other things, and it took me over 1.5 years to complete the whole book. But you know what? - on the balance, I like his non-fiction better than his fiction

not for the weak of mind.......2005-07-20

I read first one of his books titled "Ficciones" which really struck me because I never imagined a writer such book. It was fantastic so I proceeded to read this one.
This book just blew me away. I wonder how came up with all these ideas. I never get tired of reading his books. Sometimes I get a little bit dizzy because his ideas and concepts are hard to comprehend.
This book is like to read math theorems. If you like theorems, get this book. It breaks all of them.

Mandarin.......2004-08-31

Kafka knew the pathetic result of procrastination. Resultantly he ordered Max Brod to destroy his work. Two ideas govern Kafka's work, Borges maintains, subordination and infinity. His works contain infinite hierarchies. Kipling and Nietzsche shadow both Jack London and Ernest Hemingway who were both men of action.

Borges blocks out a personal library wonderfully and amusingly. He compares Kierkegaard to Hamlet! Useful notes appear at the back of the book. The volume contains 161 pieces. The introduction of Eliot Weinberger notes that Borges was a master of concision. Borges characterizes James Joyce as a millionaire of words and styles.

As a young man he postulated that all literature is autobiographical. He charges the belief in the inferiority of translations is a superstition. For reason of causality, temporal succession, texts always seem right. Rereading makes them better, more inevitable. The English have an apetite for adventure and legality Borge asserts. A detective narrative encompasses both passions. Borges writes of Croce, Dreiser, S.S. VanDine, Spengler, V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and many other writers. He finds Aldous Huxley's fame excessive. He claims for Huxley an intolerable lucidity.

Novelists present a memory of reality. Borges casts MOBY DICK as the infinite novel. One of the pieces is called "The History of the Tango." Borges proclaims the tango is sexual and violent. It has a compensatory function. Swift and Flaubert were fascinated by madness. The concepts espoused by Carlyle are an obvious Presbyterian legacy. Emerson professed a fantastic philosophy, monism. The Germans were very moved by Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE and produced countless imitations.

Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE has been a recognized masterpiece for two hundred years. Swedenborg anticipated the nebular theory of Laplace and Kant. He would have liked to talk to Sir Isaac Newton. Borges describes his blindness, an hereditary affliction of his father and grandmother too. He explains that the blind live in a world that is inconvenient. Milton, the historian Prescott, and James Joyce were blind.

This is an appropriate selection of prose works of an incredibly bright mind.

Something for everyone.......2003-09-18

This is one of those books you can just pick up, open to a random page, and start reading. His essays, like his stories, are quite short, and he writes on an astonishing variety of subjects. A big movie fan before he went blind, he writes on "Citizen Kane", "King Kong" and "The 39 Steps". He writes on Germany as it descends into barbarism in the 30s and 40s. He shares his thoughts on a wide array of writers, from Virgil to Kierkegaard to Shakespeare, to his wonderful meditations on Dante, and into Dostoevsky, Whitman, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, even Bradbury and H.G. Wells. I've barely even scratched the surface. The companion collection is called "Collected Fictions", which is funny since the line between fiction and non-fiction is often quite blurry for Borges. But both these collections are highly recommended for anyone and everyone, regardless of familiarity with the author.

Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger: The Stars

Average customer rating:

Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger: The Stars
Eliot Weinberger , and Vija Celmins
Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Arabic | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Chinese | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Japanese | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Star-Gazing | Astronomy | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Artists, A-Z | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Still Life | Painting | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Arabic | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Chinese | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Japanese | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Art Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Nonfiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Outdoors & Nature Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Hindi | More Languages | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Arts & Photography | Arabic | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Arabic | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

All Arabic Books | Arabic | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Arts & Photography | Chinese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Chinese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

All Chinese Books | Chinese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Arts & Photography | Japanese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Japanese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

All Japanese Books | Japanese | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Vija Celmins (Contemporary Artists)
Vija Celmins
Gerhard Richter: Atlas
Drawing From The Modern
Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)

ASIN: 0870707043
Release Date: 2005-10-15

Book Description

New York artist Vija Celmins has made many images of the night sky--paintings, drawings, and prints of gorgeous richness. In The Stars she and her collaborator, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, devote an artist's book to the theme. Celmins created three celestial prints for the project, which she also designed. One print, inspired by the worn binding of an early 20th-century Japanese book, becomes the volume's mottled deep-blue cover; the second and third prints are images of the night sky, one of them negative--dark stars on a pale ground. For the text, Weinberger assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources. This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, the text supplements Celmins's images visually as well as verbally. The Stars was originally a limited-edition livre d'artiste published this year by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Average customer rating:

Mitch Epstein: Work
Mitch Epstein
Manufacturer: Steidl
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Art Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

5x7
Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground
The City
Sze Tsung Leong: History Images
The Nature of Photographs

ASIN: 3865212816
Release Date: 2006-11-15

Book Description

While Mitch Epstein is widely acknowledged as one of the world's most distinguished art photographers, a complete survey of his work has never been published until now. Mitch Epstein: Work invites readers to trace the evolution of Epstein's entire career, following formal and thematic concerns that reveal how his aesthetics, his techniques and his politics have shifted and influenced one another over time. His early work on recreation is given its most natural yet unexpected configuration: Images from the United States are mixed with those from other parts of the world. Each of his major projects cover Common Practice (1973-1989), Vietnam (1992-1995), The City (1995-1998), Family Business (2000-2003), and the current, ongoing American Power. The beginning of each chapter includes a short essay by the artist or an excerpt from his previously published writings. An afterword by Eliot Weinberger and a DVD of Epstein's film Dad round out the package. Many of the pictures here have never before been exhibited or published.

Average customer rating:

A superb selection of the Borges who was and is
100th anniversary of Borges' birth
the stone and the shell
A Finely Pointed Look at Borges
The riddle of multiplicity and personal identity

Everything & Nothing
Jorge Luis Borges , Jorge Borges , Eliot Weinberger , and James E. Irby
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Latin American | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Spanish | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Caribbean & Latin American | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Essays | Literature & Fiction | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook)
Seven Nights
The Aleph and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)
Borges: Selected Non-Fictions
The Book of Imaginary Beings (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

ASIN: 0811214001

Book Description

Fiction. Translated by Donald Yates, James Irby, John Fein, and Eliot Weinburger, and with an h an introduction by Donald Yates, Everything and Nothing celebrates the centennial of Borges' birth by compiling his finest fiction.

Customer Reviews:

A superb selection of the Borges who was and is .......2006-05-08

This work contains a number of Borges' most- well known 'ficciones'. 'Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote' starts off with a catalogue of the surviving known writings of this 'fictive' author. It then describes his great project the rewriting or writing anew of 'Don Quixote' and his completion of chapters nine, and thirty- eight, and partial completion of chapter twenty- two. It goes on to explore the meaning and implication of a writing which word- by- word is identical with the original and yet reads differently.
The other stories are also among Borges' most well- known. 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' 'The Lottery in Babylon' 'The Garden of Forking Paths' 'Death and the Compass'.
Among the non- fiction works are 'Kafka and his Precursors' the now legendary 'Borges and I' ' Everything and Nothing' ' Nightmares' and 'Blindness'.
Borges games with Identity and Time are played here in the most masterful way. His depiction of the elusiveness and non- apprehendable reality of the private self is complemented by his celebration of the communal cooperative creation which is Literary Tradition.
This does not mean the work is not moving on a private confessional level. For however metaphysical it may seem Borges and I tells us much about the man himself, coffee- drinker, map- reader and student of Stevenson and Kipling. The concluding essay is of course a most moving one, as it is impossible not to be touched by the voice of 'sightlost creators who heroically persist in creating literature for the world- Homer, Milton and Borges who God 'provides day- labor for, light denied.'
The mystery and joy of great Literature is in these pages.
Read and delight.

100th anniversary of Borges' birth.......2004-07-16

The introduction to this celebratory volume "shocked" me - Borges was first published in English in 1962. Within five years, a farm kid like myself was familiar with him. Obviously, he work immediately was recognized as exceptional, out of the ordinary ... This slim volume provides an enjoyable reminder of his other works or a great introduction to the themes and style of Borges.

The volume begins with a handful of stories - the rewriting of Don Quixote, the imagined world, life as chance, spies and detectives. All of which explore language, imagination, reality, labyrinth ... In all, Borges displays a broad education, mingling literature, psychology, philosophy, philology, the occult in a manner both entertaining and provocative.

The stories are followed by essays - a meditation on the Great Wall of China and the destruction of history, a consideration of precursors to Kafka with provocative ideas of how Kafka affects our reading of his precursors, Shakespeare and self-identity, Borges and self-identity. In reading these, one is reminded how thin the line between essay and fiction is in the work of Borges.

Finally, the book closes with transcriptions of two speeches - one on dreams and nightmares, the other on blindness and the poet.

This wonderful selection provides a representative and varied introduction to Borges that is not to be missed. The translations are excellent, the writing superb.

the stone and the shell.......2002-06-04

This beautiful little book contains just a few of Borges' best works from his 1944 work Ficciones (also widely available in the 1964 collection of English translations entitled Labyrinths).

It also includes important later works of Borges, Nightmares and Blindness (transcriptions of two lectures from 1977).

His own worst nightmare involves discovering the King of Norway, with his sword and his dog, sitting at the foot of Borges' bed. "Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible." Such is the power of describing, of reading this father of modern literature.

In Blindness, he examines his own loss of sight in the context of examining poetry itself. In a story right out of, well, Borges, he discusses his appointment as Director of a library at the very time he has lost his reading sight. (Two other Directors are also blind.)

"No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God; who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch."

This lecture is a moving (and brief, just 15 pages) ode to poetry . If one wants ironic context, just consider that these lectures on Nightmares and Blindness were delivered in Buenos Aires at the height of the State of Siege of the Argentine Generals.

...

A Finely Pointed Look at Borges.......2000-05-17

It seems alternately true and false that Jorge Luis Borges lives inside each of his writings in a completely symbiotic or photosynthetic way, feeding off his own product until the man and his work are indistinguishable; the man never seemed to be able to detach himself from his story and simply write, and yet at times his expected voicing disappears and one might believe another author has usurped Borges' pen to complete another metaphysic tale. Borges wore many masks, and that fact is acknowledged by the man himself here, in the tiny, fascinating "Borges and I," in which Stevenson is both invoked and mentioned, crafting a Jekyll-and-Hydean bit of self-awareness with the unmistakable tango twist of Borges' playful Argentinian idiom. Everything and Nothing is a sampler of Borges' finest work from his fiction and nonfiction batteries, which are almost indistinguishable. They overflow with Borges' fascination with logic, labyrinths, language, and the relation between the three (for a fine nonfiction work in this vein, read Poundstone's Labyrinth of Reason) and how they figure in philosophy and metaphysics. For a more whole view of Borges, try the new large collections of his work, but for a tiny glance at the genius of this literary superstar, Everything and Nothing is perfect.

The riddle of multiplicity and personal identity.......2000-04-23

The indefinability of the self and the multiplicity of personal identity are the main lines of thought connecting these 11 pieces of excellent literature, among the finest of Borges's. An author of short fiction stories, essayist and poet -though perhaps too much of a thinker for poetry-, Borges is, without hesitation, one of the greatest writers of all time. This careful, well-thought selection gives a brilliant account of one of Borges's conspicuous, recurrent themes: the difficulty of defining self-identity, since a man's distinctive features, whether mental, physical or even metaphysical, are not unique to him. As in some of the most noted masterpieces of literature, the philosophical substrate provides the background for fascinating and intriguing stories, frequently trespassing the fantastic or the bizarre. So, we witness the struggle of an early 20th Century French novelist to write The Quixote -not a contemporary version of Cervantes's renowned work, but the original -- and succeeding! We have the occasion to come to terms with the strange world of Tlön and its uncanny understanding of reality, as shown by its diverse, odd languages. The Lottery of Babylon gives every man the opportunity to become rich, powerful and exultant...or appallingly miserable and abject -by chance? The Garden of Forking Paths is a legacy of innumerable futures -which, however, does not include all of them. Death and the Compass displays the confrontation of a detective with his murderer, whom he is chasing, in a labyrinth of clues spread throughout space and time. The brief historical and literary essays concerning the elusive and somewhat contradictory character of the Emperor of China, builder of the Great Wall and destructor of books, and the precursors of Kafka, paving the way for something they ignore and being later re-created, explore the indefinability of man's essence, in much the same way as the previous fiction stories, since one never knows quite what are the limits between fiction and fact, both inside and out of Borges's work. Borges and I and Everything and Nothing -the latter is the original title by the author in English, though the work was written, as the rest of the compilation, in Spanish- express succinctly the core argument of the book, raising an uneasy metaphysical question: Whereas man may not know exactly who he is, does God know? Finally, two conferences given by Borges close the volume, turning to episodes from Borges's own life, in order to resume somehow the book's contents by invoking the fantastic worlds of dreams -rather, of nightmares- and of blindness, that suggest a vaster and more weird reality with perhaps blurrier limits than we can possibly understand. However, there is space for man if we are able to accept what we cannot understand, as a starting point for creating our own-made life.

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987: Bilingual Edition

Average customer rating:

Collected Poems of Octavio Paz
excellent poetry
Sing the Voice Fantastico
Obra poética.
Elegant

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987: Bilingual Edition
Octavio Paz , and Eliot Weinberger
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Carribean & Latin American | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre
The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism
Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems (Edición bilingüe)
The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Revised)
The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

ASIN: 0811211738

Book Description

tr Weinberger, w/Bishop, Blackburn, Levertov et al

Customer Reviews:

Collected Poems of Octavio Paz.......2006-03-10

This is an excellent edition of the collected poems of Octavio Paz, with English translations facing the Spanish originals. I purchased this as a gift for my Spanish teacher and she was delighted! My favorites are his poems written when he served as a Mexican diplomat in India and Japan. His sensitive mind absorbed the nuances of place and religion, which are recreated for us in the poems. His efforts at haiku en espagnol are enlightening, pun intended.

excellent poetry.......2006-03-02

I bought this book after reading an excerpt of one of Paz's poems at a camp. I didn't know what poem it was from, so I bought the book and scoured it until I found the poem. It was Brotherhood. The poetry is beautiful and moving. It is the type of poetry you can read and enjoy no matter if you understand what it is saying, the writing is that beautiful

Sing the Voice Fantastico.......2001-08-15

Octavio Paz has since passed through this world leaving behind a beautiful web of words with the tapestry of things seen and unseen. Paz does an ambidextrous job of mixing in elements of surrealism with the bone of natural objects and that which is very real. His, and the translator Eliot Weinberger ... along with the help of other poet translators to include Bishop, Levertov, Tomlinson--all of their words come alive with beautiful language. The translation seems true to the intent.

What is essential about this book is that each poem comes with the bilingual translation in English and accompanied by the original works in Spanish. Two years of high school Spanish, as well as two years in college, has rendered me with a woefully inadequate ineptitude of all words and understanding of that language. But I don't think that the translation can ever capture the sound, the alliteration, the true tongue/la lingua and fluid language that Paz meant in his original Spanish. Even if I don't understand a lick of what's on the left side of the page in Spanish at least it can be read for it's beautiful sound. Listen to this, "Through the conduits of bone I night I water I forest that moves forward I tongue I body I sun-bone Through the conduits of night" and then on the even-numbered page, "Por el arcaduz de hueso yo noche yo agua yo bosque que avanza yo lengua yo cuerpo yo hueso de sol Por el arcaduz de noche."

What are you doing still sitting here reading my crappy writing when you could be reading Ocatavio Paz? Go get the book...you'll see.

Obra poética........2001-05-05

Example 1: "Un cuerpo, un cuerpo solo, sólo un cuerpo,/un cuerpo como día derramado/y noche devorada". Example 2: "Lates entre la sombra/blanca y desnuda: río." Octavio Paz is one of the first voices of the xxth century mexican poetry. He is the most important blend between clasicism and the modern trends in poetical expresion. He lived in France and thus, he experienced surrealism and mingled with the likes of Breton, Éluard, et al. In México he estimulated the literary critic and reviews to new standars of excelence. Read O. Paz.

Elegant.......2001-04-20

Paz' poetry is sublime, and elegant. The words and ideas simply slip off the page. Its like taking a bath in chocolate.

Book Description

In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of his court. Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.

Customer Reviews:

An Excellent Read.......2006-01-16

I personally enjoy memoirs so I jumped at the chance to read this book when my study abroad program had it listed as required reading. Although it seems a bit dated, since it's from the early 20s, Ackerley presents an awesomely sympathetic view of the Indian people mere decades before the Partition during a time when the British weren't so keen on the Idian culture (as Ackerley makes the reader aware of with his portraits of resident British). I thought Ackerley wrote a stunningly entertaining book, giving candid portraits of various Indians and British alike. As long as you don't mind reading about the everday goings-on then you'll love this book. Apparently it also gives a very accurate description of India at this time, or my program wouldn't have had it on its list of required reading.

A literary holiday........2006-01-06

What an absolute charmer this journal is. This is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for a number of years, but for one reason or another had never got around to. I'm so happy I finally did. Not at all what I expected. I've enjoyed a number of books covering the theme of East meets West culture clashes such as Orwell's brilliant "Burmese Days," Ruth Jhabvala's "Heat and Dust" and Forster's "A Passage to India" and "The Hill of Devi." Still, I think it is Ackerley's whimsical reminiscence I like best.

Published in 1932, I know that some will find this book dated and politically incorrect. I prefer to accept it as a product of its time. The journal covers the six months that Ackerley served as a private secretary to a Maharajah. The author pokes fun at the many arcane traditions and myths of the Hindu culture, without ever becoming malicious. The Indian King is somewhat of an incorrigible lech and maker of mischief as depicted by Ackerley. The stuffy British aren't spared the barb either. I particulary loved this exchange: "...'Do you like India?' Mrs. Bristow asked me. 'Oh, yes. I think it's marvelous.' 'And what do you think of the people?' 'I like them very much, and think them most interesting.' 'Oo, aren't you a fibber! What was it you said the other day about "awful Anglo-Indian chatter"?' 'But I thought you were speaking of the Indians just now, not the Ango-Indians.' 'The Indians! I never think of them.' 'Well, you said "the people," you know.' 'I meant us people, stupid.' 'I see. Well now, let's start again.'"

Openly homosexual, Ackerley has great fun documenting his flirtatious encounters with a number of the Maharajah's servants - "....And in the dark roadway, overshadowed by trees, he put up his face and kissed me on the cheek. I returned his kiss: but he at once drew back, crying out: 'Not the mouth! You eat meat! You eat meat!' 'Yes, and I will eat you in a minute,' I said, and kissed him on the lips again, and this time he did not draw away." Altogether disarming and delightful (and not at all exploitive). Highly recommended.

Droll, often disquieting, observations of the British Raj.......2005-03-15

A journal of Ackerley's stay in the Indian province of Chhatarpur during the 1920s, "Hindoo Holiday" records and mocks the muddled morality and intellectual immaturity of both slothful Indian rulers and equally pampered British colonialists. After Ackerley returned from India, he spent several years touching up his diary for publication; he changed the names, toned down the sexual content, and removed passages that might be considered libelous. This recently published version is the first unexpurgated American edition, with all the cuts restored.

Ackerley's intent was to be mischievous and outrageous and comic; and his book became both a critical hit and, to everyone's surprise, his most commercially successful work. The book is at its best in its humorous depictions of the Maharajah, his private secretary Babaji Rao, and the contingent of valets, including the endearingly sweet Sharma and Narayan. For the most part, Ackerley's portraits are nonjudgmental and fond; he reserves his venom for the British guests and, to a lesser extent, for his sycophantic tutor, Abdul, and clumsy servant-child, Habib.

Throughout "Hindoo Holiday" there is a disconcerting, even creepy, undercurrent that revolves around the sexual despotism of the Maharajah, whose predatory advances are directed towards the "Gods"--his name for the boys in his employ. "Boys" is Ackerley's term; at least one is identified as being twenty and several are married, so it's possibly more accurate to call most of them young men. But, whatever their age, these youngsters are compelled to have sexual relations with the Maharajah--and with his wife while he's watching. Complicating this issue is the subtly hinted possibility that the ruler is suffering from the advanced stages of syphilis. (The paternity of the palace's heirs is a great mystery, as well.) Only a few of the youths seem able to withstand his advances, and Ackerley often must come to the defense of Narayan, one of the "Gods" who refuses to comply.

Ackerley reports these incidents with disquieting aplomb. His own role in these matters is rather innocent; according to biographer Peter Parker, he limited his affections to kissing and holding hands: "If he had sexual relations whilst in India, he left no record of the fact." (And Ackerley was not known for being shy about such matters in either his journals or correspondence.) Nevertheless, intentionally or not, the goings-on in the palace are emblematic of the corruption, indolence, and decadence of the British Raj.

Most modern readers, then, will find much of the tone and material and humor in "Hindoo Holiday" a bit dated. Yet Ackerley's memoir is still an accurate portrait of the time--and there are moments of brilliant hilarity.

I thought it was great.......2004-07-31

Ackerly is a naughty naughty man. I agree with another reviewer who said that he was honest in his depicitions of the people he encountered as well as himself. Ackerly understood the hearts of the people he knew. Often he made fun of what he saw in people, but he knew them and knew when to put away his naughtiness. This was a great book. It was funny and charming. It gave me a glance into what India was like and may still be. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an open mind.

Sly and Witty.......2003-07-14

This is one of those books that I will always keep by my bed as a reminder not to take myself too seriously in any capacity. I found this a terribly funny book, mostly becuase it rang so true. Ackerley is fabulous company, shockingly observant and brutally honest, even when it plunges him into bad light. We tip-toe so carefully around so many of the subjects he faces head on - racism, homosexuality, class and privilege. He doesn't flinch.

Average customer rating:

exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile
The Poetry of Exile

Unlock
Bei Dao
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Chinese | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Asian | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Chinese | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0811214478

Book Description

New poetry by the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile. Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who invented a new poetry and a new language in the attempt to speak of the enormity of their times. The sixth book of Bei Dao's work published by New Directions, Unlock has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, the distinguished essayist and critically acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and the poet himself.

Customer Reviews:

exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile.......2002-01-03

the book, also, never mentions barbed wire but makes barbed wire come to mind. Bei Dao's writing is some of the most pressing, urgent poetry I have ever read. The man is a great poetic genius. With lines about such things as the wind closing its iron fist, Bei Dao speaks with power & elegance against repression & of the absolute importance of the individual. This book is very important. Bei Dao has made himself a significant man. Context of human value. According to Jonathan Spence from the New York Times Book Review, Bei Dao "was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.'" According to highly respected poet Robert Hass, "[A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame." Something else that's nice about this book is that it's bilingual, & Bei Dao was active in the translation process.

The Poetry of Exile.......2000-12-09

This is a wonderful collection of Bei Dao's most recent works. What I love most about his poetry is the way it grapples with language in a way that is not quite surreal but not concrete either. Many of the poems are self reflective in that they ponder what it means to be a poet writing and thinking in a language that is not the same as the places of his "exile" (Western Europe and the United States). Although, in my opinion, the book of poetry prior to this collection, called Old Snow, is an even stronger statement on these issues. You can tell from the poetry that the current political situation of China, and an alienation are still fresh in Bei Dao's mind (I have talked briefly with Bei Dao about some of these issues). I have no doubt that he will find a place as one of the great poets of the modern age.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated

Average customer rating:

making the impossible seem easy
Amazing wee book
Nothing is more difficult than simplicity
An Amazing Look At the Relative Human Mind
For anyone with an interest in translations

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated
Eliot Weinberger
Manufacturer: Moyer Bell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Asian | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
The Selected Poems of Wang Wei (New Directions Paperbook)
The Heart of Chinese Poetry
Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'Ang and Sung Dynasty Verse
The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry

ASIN: 0918825148

Customer Reviews:

making the impossible seem easy.......2007-05-07

Any attempt to translate poetry from one language to another is fraught with difficulty, and that is increased many times when the languages and non-comensurate ones like Chinese and American. This little book does not take long to read, but deserves close study in order to tease out how different (western) minds have attempted to put Chinese into American. This book shoud be in the library of anyone interested in poetry in general and Chinese poetry in particular.

Amazing wee book.......2002-09-20

I checked the book out of the local library a couple of weeks ago and have not stopped reading it since. The library volume is due back, so I just purchased it. My only complaint is that the last poem is Gary Synder's from 1978. I would like to see Mr Weinberger reissue the volume with latter translations such as Arthur Sze or Sam Hamill. And if any one is looking for a most needed project, a translation of all of Wang Wei's Wang River poems.

Nothing is more difficult than simplicity.......2002-08-06

Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry, says Eliot Weinberger in the introduction to this small volume, is that which is worth translating.
Both, of course, are right. That is what I like about poetry. It tolerates different points of view, a multitude of interpretations. A poem, or its translation, is never 'right', it is always the expression of an individual reader's experience at a certain point in his or her life: "As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different - not just another - reading. The same poem cannot be read twice."

"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated" contains a simple four-line poem, over 1200 years old, written by Wang Wei (c. 700-761 AD), a man of Buddhist belief, known as a painter and calligrapher in his time. The book gives the original text in Chinese characters, a transliteration in the pinyin system, a character-by-character translation, 13 translations in English (written between 1919 and 1978), 2 translations in French, and one particularly beautiful translation in Spanish by Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the Mexican poet who received the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature. Paz has also added a six-page essay on his translation of the poem.

Wang Wei's poems are fascinating in their apparent simplicity, their precision of observation, and their philosophical depth. The poem in question here is no exception. I would translate it as:

Empty mountains
I see no one

but I hear echoes
of someone's words

evening sunlight
shines into the deep forest

and is reflected
on the green mosses above

Compared to the translations of Burton Watson (1971), Octavio Paz (1974), and Gary Snyder (1978), this version has a number of flaws. My most flagrant sin is the use of a poetic first person, the "I", while the original poem merely implies an observer. The translation reflects what I found most intriguing in the original text. First of all, the movement of light and sound, in particular the reflection of light that mirrors the echo of sound earlier in the poem. Secondly, the conspicuous last word of the poem: "shang"; in Chinese it is a simple three-stroke character that today means 'above' (it is the same "shang" as in Shanghai ' the city's name means literally 'above the sea').

This is a very simple poem. The simplicity is deceptive, though. What looks very natural, still wants to make a point. The point is that looking is just one thing, but being open to echoes and reflections is what really yields new and unexpected experiences. Wang Wei applies the "mirror" metaphor in a new way in his poem. This metaphor was very popular in Daoist and Buddhist literature, and says roughly that the mind of a wise person should be like a mirror, simply reflective and untainted by emotion. Wang Wei seems to have this metaphor in mind when he mentions echoes and reflections in his poem. A Buddhist or a Daoist, for that matter, would also recognize the principle of "Wu Wei" (non-action) here: nothing can be forced or kept, everything simply "falls" to you and will be lost again. In this sense, a person cannot "see" (as in the activity of seeing); a person can only be "struck" by the visible (as in being illuminated - the "satori" of Zen Buddhism).

"Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" is a light, unscholarly book - and I mean this as a compliment. It is a pure pleasure to read the different translations together with Weinberger's lucid comments. Weinberger has a wonderful sense of humor to accompany his analytical mind; and he is allergic to pomposity. He enjoys mocking the pompous. This is what he has to say about one translator's misguided efforts to rhyme Wang Wei's poem: "line 2 ... adds 'cross' for the rhyme scheme he [the translator] has imposed on himself. (Not much rhymes with 'moss'; it's something of an albatross. But he might have attempted an Elizabethan pastoral 'echoing voices toss' or perhaps a half-Augustan, half-Dada 'echoing voices sauce')."

In the translation of Chinese poetry, as in everything, Weinberger notes, nothing is more difficult than simplicity.

Simplicity is particularly difficult for certain academics, it seems. A professor, who had read Weinberger's comments on Wang Wei's poem in a magazine, furiously complained about the "crimes against Chinese poetry" Weinberger had allegedly committed by neglecting "Boodberg's cedule." Weinberger later discovered that this cryptic reference was to a series of essays privately published by professor Peter A. Boodberg in 1954 and 1955 entitled "Cedules from a Berkeley Workshop in Asiatic Philosophy" ('cedule' is an obscure word for 'scroll, writing, schedule'). "Boodberg ends his 'cedule' with his own version of the poem, which he calls 'a still inadequate, yet philologically correct, rendition ... (with due attention to grapho-syntactic overtones and enjambment)':

The empty mountain: to see no men,
Barely earminded of men talking - countertones,
And antistrophic lights-and-shadows incoming deeper the deep-treed grove
Once more to glowlight the blue-green mosses - going up (The empty mountain...)

To me this sounds like Gerard Manly Hopkins on L S D, and I am grateful to the furious professor for sending me in search of this, the strangest of the many Weis."

An Amazing Look At the Relative Human Mind.......2002-03-15

The multiple translations of Wang Wei's poem are a door into the incredible spectrum of human thinking. This small delicate poem and its translations show how culture, translation and individual thinking change a work of art. I found myself writing a "translation" of the poem to discover yet another prismatic dimension of this jewel of a poem.

For anyone with an interest in translations.......2000-08-27

This book takes a 4 line poem in Chinese, then looks at 19 translations of the poem and provides a commentary on what works, does not work, is added, is omitted ... for three of the translations - Octavio Paz, Gary Snyder and Francoise Cheng comments of the translator are also given. This is a wonderful case study on the art of translation.

Outside the aspect of translation, the volume also gives the reader ample opportunity to become familiar with Wang Wei's poem and with its Buddhist content.

World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions (New Directions Paperbook)
Average customer rating:
World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions (New Directions Paperbook)

Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Terrestrial Intelligence: International Fiction Now from New Directions (New Directions Paperbook)

Muhammad

What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles

The War Works Hard

Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932

ASIN: 0811216519

Book Description

A celebration of contemporary poetry from around the world, World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions is a treasure trove that will satisfy and fascinate poetry lovers. A mosaic of twenty-eight foreign and American poets, World Beat is an extraordinary compilation, unlike any other anthology, of the poetry being written today. For some seventy years, New Directions Publishing has brought literary America the world, introducing many of the world's most important, and at the time usually unknown, writers. Today, with a diminishing earth and an increasingly isolated United States, dialogue among the nations is desperately needed. On the poetic front, this dialogue assumes a particular potency and urgency. In World Beat, expertly edited by the remarkable writer and translator Eliot Weinberger, a new generation of New Directions poets from across the globe mingles in a euphonic cross-cultural chorus. The collection opens with the last poem by Octavio Paz, a major work previously unpublished in book form, and then tracks through the writings of foreign and American poets that New Directions has published in recent years. From the haunting erotic lyrics of the young Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku, to the powerful political insights of exiled Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, and Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, to the lapidary beauty of Dutch poet Hans Faverey and the wild experiments of Chinese poet Gu Cheng and Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi, to Nobel Prize shortlisters Bei Dao of China, Inger Christensen of Denmark, Gennady Aygi of Chuvashia, and Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden—here is a planetary greatest hits that also includes work by Canadian Anne Carson and a range of American poets (Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Robert Creeley among them), whose works take on new resonances when read alongside their world-peers.

An Elemental Thing (New Directions Paperbook)

Average customer rating:

An Elemental Thing (New Directions Paperbook)
Eliot Weinberger
Manufacturer: New Directions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Karmic Traces
Outside Stories 1987-1991
The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
Muhammad
Varieties of Disturbance: Stories

ASIN: 0811216942

Book Description

In a new cycle of linked nonfiction prose-pieces, Eliot Weinberger creates another "vortex for the entire universe." (Boston Review) If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming. If the jaguar bites you, they are not people. —Eliot Weinberger, from "Lacandons" Internationally acclaimed as one of the most innovative writers today, Eliot Weinberger has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narrative where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable. With An Elemental Thing, Weinberger turns from his celebrated political chronicles to the timelessness of the subjects of his literary essays. With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq border and the Kaluli in the mountains of New Guinea. Among the thirty-five essays included are a poetic biography of the prophet Muhammad, which was praised by the London Times for its "great beauty and grace," and "The Stars," a reverie on what's up there that has already been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and Maori.

Authors:

Authors

Authors