Joachim Sartorius - Böcker

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann’s paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus Heaney, Fernando Pessoa, and László Krasznahorkai, among many others.  In Poetry and Time, Neumann’s haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: “They know what it is they do, but do not say it.” Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems’ reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius’s ruminations beautifully complement Neumann’s series of thirty poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.

The history of the island of Cyprus is in many ways a world history. Its strategic position means it has been coveted by one foreign power after another. All came here: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, crusaders, Venetians, Genoese, Ottomans, British, and they all left their mark. Aside from the Roman and early-Byzantine ruins of Salamis, the most impressive monuments date from the Frankish and Venetian times: the Abbey of Bellapais, the fortified harbour of Kyrenia, the magnificent cathedrals of Nicosia and Famagusta, the setting for Shakespeare's Othello. Sartorius lived in Cyprus for three years. In My Cyprus he returns to the cultures and legends, to the colours and the light of the Levant, sifting the sediments of the island's history, including its division after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the difficulties that followed. Yet this is not the work of a historian or a political scientist, but of a poet, who with the help of friends, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, tries to understand this unique place.

Off the coast of Istanbul, in the Marmara Sea, lie the Princes' Islands. An archipelago of unusual natural beauty, they have long been considered the maritime suburb of the imperial capital on the Bosporus and effectively shaped by its manifold history. The poet Joachim Sartorius draws a loving portrait of the landscape and the light; the political observer Sartorius describes the microcosm, which was always a reflection of Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium, while the novelist Sartorius introduces us to the characters, who inhabit this time capsule.

Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean: a place of brute power, dazzling culture, and vivid myth. Here, tyrants waged wars and built vast palaces, Aeschylus staged tragedies, Plato hoped to create his ideal 'philosopher king', and the nymph Arethusa, transformed into water, lived on as a spring fringed with papyrus.Moving to the city after a bereavement, the poet Joachim Sartorius discovers a place of haunting and haunted beauty, where the layers of the past are always visible. At his side we wander with demigods and generals through the old town of Ortigia and meet the people of the present-day city: its artists and police officers, cafe owners and barbers, barons and refugees.Unravelling the threads of Sicilian history, Sartorius explores the city's mingling of ancient and modern, Greek and Arab, medieval and baroque, creating a portrait of a city inseparably entwined with its past.

Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean: a place of brute power, dazzling culture, and vivid myth. Here, tyrants waged wars and built vast palaces, Aeschylus staged tragedies, Plato hoped to create his ideal ‘philosopher king’, and the nymph Arethusa, transformed into water, lived on as a spring fringed with papyrus.Moving to the city after a bereavement, the poet Joachim Sartorius discovers a place of haunting and haunted beauty, where the layers of the past are always visible. At his side we wander with demigods and generals through the old town of Ortigia and meet the people of the present-day city: its artists and police officers, café owners and barbers, barons and refugees.Unravelling the threads of Sicilian history, Sartorius explores the city’s mingling of ancient and modern, Greek and Arab, medieval and baroque, creating a portrait of a city inseparably entwined with its past.