Brian Swann – författare

"In Piccolo's poems we meet a Sicily latent in the country of the tourist guides and the history books, but it was Piccolo far more than, say, his cousin Lampedusa, who was destined to draw out the latencies, read the signatures, crack the code...These brilliant translations will serve to introduce a whole new sensibility to Anglo-American readers."--Anthony Burgess "Faithfulness, a loving adherence, a communion with and an entering into the spirit of the original are what we look for in a translation. We find these qualities abundantly in this rendering of Lucio Piccolo's poetry by Brian Swarm and Ruth Feldman. And we find yet more: a welcome clarification, for though Piccolo's poetry--one that tries to capture in a subtle web the atmosphere of a bygone world--is not obscure or oblique, yet, like all significant poetry, it is here and there open to a number of interpretations. Swann's and Feldman's translation, or interpretation, seems to me always felicitous and intelligent."--Arturo Vivante Originally published in 1973.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"In Piccolo's poems we meet a Sicily latent in the country of the tourist guides and the history books, but it was Piccolo far more than, say, his cousin Lampedusa, who was destined to draw out the latencies, read the signatures, crack the code...These brilliant translations will serve to introduce a whole new sensibility to Anglo-American readers."--Anthony Burgess "Faithfulness, a loving adherence, a communion with and an entering into the spirit of the original are what we look for in a translation. We find these qualities abundantly in this rendering of Lucio Piccolo's poetry by Brian Swarm and Ruth Feldman. And we find yet more: a welcome clarification, for though Piccolo's poetry--one that tries to capture in a subtle web the atmosphere of a bygone world--is not obscure or oblique, yet, like all significant poetry, it is here and there open to a number of interpretations. Swann's and Feldman's translation, or interpretation, seems to me always felicitous and intelligent."--Arturo Vivante Originally published in 1973.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Sky Loom offers a dazzling introduction to Native American myths, stories, and songs drawn from previous collections by acclaimed translator and poet Brian Swann. With a general introduction by Swann, Sky Loom is a stunning collection that provides a glimpse into the intricacies and beauties of story and myth, placing them in their cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts.Each of the twenty-six selections is translated and introduced by a well-known expert on Native oral literatures and offers entry into the cultures and traditions of several different tribes and bands, including the Yupiit and the Tlingits of the polar North; the Coast Salish and the Kwakwaka’wakw of the Pacific Northwest; the Navajos, the Pimas, and the Yaquis of the Southwest; the Lakota Sioux and the Plains Crees of the Great Plains; the Ojibwes of the Great Lakes; the Naskapis and the Eastern Crees of the Hudson Bay area in Canada; and the Munsees of the Northeast. Sky Loom takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through literary traditions older than the “discovery” of the New World.

Since Europeans first encountered Native Americans, problems relating to language and text translation have been an issue. Translators needed to create the tools for translation, such as dictionaries, still a difficult undertaking today. Although the fact that many Native languages do not share even the same structures or classes of words as European languages has always made translation difficult, translating cultural values and perceptions into the idiom of another culture renders the process even more difficult. In Born in the Blood, noted translator and writer Brian Swann gathers some of the foremost scholars in the field of Native American translation to address the many and varied problems and concerns surrounding the process of translating Native American languages and texts. The essays in this collection address such important questions as, what should be translated? how should it be translated? who should do translation? and even, should the translation of Native literature be done at all? This volume also includes translations of songs and stories.

Storytelling and singing continue to be a vital part of community life for Native peoples today. Voices from Four Directions gathers stories and songs from thirty-one Native groups in North America—including the Iñupiaqs in the frigid North, the Lushootseeds along the forested coastline of the far West, the Catawbas in the humid South, and the Maliseets of the rugged woods of the East. Vivid stories of cosmological origins and transformation, historical events remembered and retold, as well as legendary fables can be found in these pages. Well-known Trickster figures like Raven, Rabbit, and Coyote figure prominently in several tales as do heroes of local fame such as Tom Laporte of the Maliseets. The stories and songs entertain, instruct, and recall rich legacies as well as obligations. Many are retellings and reinventions of classic narratives, while others are more recent creations. Award-winning poet and critic Brian Swann has gathered some of the richest and most diverse literatures of Native North America and provides an introduction to the volume. In addition, each story is introduced and newly translated.

I Tell You Now is an anthology of autobiographical accounts by eighteen notable Native writers of different ages, tribes, and areas. This second edition features a new introduction by the editors and updated biographical sketches for each writer.

When Europeans first arrived on this continent, Algonquian languages were spoken from the northeastern seaboard through the Great Lakes region, across much of Canada, and even in scattered communities of the American West. The rich and varied oral tradition of this Native language family, one of the farthest-flung in North America, comes brilliantly to life in this remarkably broad sampling of Algonquian songs and stories from across the centuries. Ranging from the speech of an early unknown Algonquian to the famous Walam Olum hoax, from retranslations of "classic" stories to texts appearing here for the first time, these are tales written or told by Native storytellers, today as in the past, as well as oratory, oral history, and songs sung to this day. An essential introduction and captivating guide to Native literary traditions still thriving in many parts of North America, Algonquian Spirit contains vital background information and new translations of songs and stories reaching back to the seventeenth century. Drawing from Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Cree, Delaware, Maliseet, Menominee, Meskwaki, Miami-Illinois, Mi'kmaq, Naskapi, Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy, Potawatomi, and Shawnee, the collection gathers a host of respected and talented singers, storytellers, historians, anthropologists, linguists, and tribal educators, both Native and non-Native, from the United States and Canada—all working together to orchestrate a single, complex performance of the Algonquian languages.

With Wearing the Morning Star, Brian Swann presents a collection of more than one hundred Native American songs that celebrate the rich and vibrant oral traditions of the Indigenous peoples of North America. These are songs of the earth and the sky, songs of mourning and of love, parts of ceremonies and rites and rituals. Some have familiar themes; others illuminate the complexities and differences of the Native cultures. The collection includes songs of derision and threat, ribald songs, hunting chants, and a song sung by an Inuit about the first airplane he ever saw. Swann has provided an authoritative introduction and notes for each selection that place the songs in their cultural contexts. He has reworked the original translations where appropriate to allow the modern reader to appreciate and enjoy these remarkable works and provides a new preface for this Bison Books edition.

A collection of Native American songs and poems, researched and annotated by Brian Swann.

Walk with this book to find some of the unexpected places where poetry can flourish. Discover poetry growing "where it can," in the infinite and in the microscopic: in the "star-gazing, star-thinking, star-dreaming...Milky Way," and "in minute invisible architectures...of snowflake sculpture reality;" in mountain passes where "gold leaves spill and spin like doubloons," and in the grizzly, "hunger-hearted and ugly, a horrible beauty, / a hairy breath of berry-laced and blood-hot red, / hunter and hunted, and hated;" in the city where "birds...survive to sing about sun- / light straining through the gritty breath / of New York," and in wilderness that has "no nakedness," that is "lovely because it is empty."The poems in this anthology first appeared in The Amicus Journal, the quarterly publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Selected by the journal’s poetry editor, Brian Swann, they represent a broad array of responses to the natural world—from warning to celebration—by some of the nation’s most distinguished poets. Included is work by American poets Wendell Berry, Michael Dorris, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, Pattiann Rogers, and William Stafford, as well as work from poets in Australia and Mexico. All grapple with issues of nature and the environment from the perspective of the final decade of the millennium.These poems remind us that we can be dazzled both by nature and by the poetry that explores the natural world.

There is a clearing by a certain stone where images flow and are worth stopping for. I have stayed there almost all day in silence until night remembered what belonged to it and its shadows started to take back its own. I've found it hard to walk away as starlight infused daisies and the stone itself began to feel like a star so, although what I have done with my life may not be much, for a while it seemed to be in line. The poems of In Late Light situate objects and experiences (both large and small, concrete and abstract) within Brian Swann's perspective of the natural world. Sixty-two poems presented in four sections explore his life-from early days to the present-evoking friends and family on two continents. His sharp, bright imagery affirms the unique beauty of our world and explores its invisible mysteries.

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.