Mary Ann Caws - Böcker

For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original. In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.

This rich anthology of writings in French by twentieth-century women presents a dazzling array of literary treasures. The editors, all distinguished specialists in French studies, have expanded the boundaries of French literary terrain beyond France, Belgium, and Switzerland to North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and French Canada. These compelling poems, short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels (some complete and others excerpts), represent thirty-one contemporary authors, including Colette, Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, Joyce Mansour, Renée Vivien, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert.Exploring issues and experiences of universal interest from women's perspectives, this collection focuses first on themes of relationships (both personal and political) and how violence breaks them apart, and second on the ways in which identity is influenced by race, language, nationality, and sexuality. The book, which is entirely in French, includes biographical sketches of each author as well as a critical introduction to each section that invites comparisons among the writers' diverse views on such themes as parenting, love, marriage, political and interpersonal power, existence, the process of becoming a writer, and the formation of an identity in a polyphonic and pluralistic world.

A comprehensive bilingual collection of twentieth-century French poetryNot since the publication of Paul Auster’s The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1984) has there been a significant and widely read anthology of modern French poetry in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary verse of scourge Michel Houellebecq. Many of the English translations (on facing pages) are justly celebrated, composed by eminent figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery; many others are new and have been commissioned for this book.Distinguished scholar and editor Mary Ann Caws has chosen work by more than 100 poets. Her deliberately extensive, international selection includes work by Francophone poets, by writers better known for accomplishments in other genres (novelists, songwriters, performance artists), and by many more female poets than have typically been represented in past anthologies of modern French poetry. The editor has opted for a chronological organization that highlights six crucial “pressure points” in modern French poetry. Accompanying the selections are a general introduction, informative essays on each period, and short biographical notes—all prepared by the editor.

This volume provides a wide-ranging collection of the writing of noted Bloomsbury figure Vita Sackville-West. One of the most well known lesbian authors of the 20th century, Sackville-West was a central figure among the Bloomsbury modernists, and had a torrid love affair with Virginia Woolf. She wrote in an astounding variety of genres, including travel writing, poetry, fiction, and essays, and is probably best known for her novels, "The Edwardians" and "All Passion Spent", and aristocratic writings about English country gardens. This book collects a wide variety of her works, over half of which, including her travel notebooks, her diaries, some short stories, and her intimate dream notebook, have never been published.

The Selected Poems of René Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet’s wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugène Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon created a movement that spread wildly to all corners of the globe, inspiring not only poetry but also artists like Joan Miro and René Magritte and cinematic works by Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí. As the editor, Mary Ann Caws, says, “Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived.”Here are the gems of this major, mind-bending aesthetic, political, and humane movement: writers as diverse as Aragon, Breton, Dalí, René Char, Robert Desnos, Mina Loy, Paul Magritte, Alice Paalen, Gisèle Prassinos, Man Ray, Kay Sage, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are included here, providing a grand picture of this revolutionary movement that shocked the world.

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

The southern landscape forms a lush backdrop in this memoir by Mary Ann Caws in which she recounts a life of passionate engagement. She sketches her early years in North Carolina, where she makes her debut and begins to struggle with accepted social values of the time and region. She recounts the tangled relationships of her family and her ties to her sister, parents, and the grandmother - a painter - who served as her role model.Caws describes her education at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale - where she weds a professor of philosophy. She details the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding. Finally, Caws relates her deep passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their field house in Provence.""To the Boathouse"" is the account of a southern girl and her maturing sense of self as she grows to become one of the most prolific and accomplished writers and critics of our day.

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European "fortunes". These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which Virginia Woolf has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. Diverse as her reception has been, as analyst of consciousness, as a decadent (censored and banned), as stylistic innovator of Modernism, as crusading feminist and socialist, and as a model for other writers, she has emerged as one of the foremost writers and principal icons of the century

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.

The first comprehensive guide to the prose poem, this book covers the history of the genre from Aloyisius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemporary practitioners. It gives special attention to the genre's hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offers analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre's transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the next.

The first comprehensive guide to the prose poem, this book covers the history of the genre from Aloyisius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemporary practitioners. It gives special attention to the genre’s hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offers analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre’s transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the next.

More than thirty years ago, Mary Ann Caws, then a young professor, moved to Provence to translate the poetry of Provençal poet René Char. What sounded like a simple romantic sojourn turned into a journey of self-discovery on the joys of living simply: good company, good food, and great wine, preferably from your neighbor’s vineyard. There was little else in the way of material goods. Her little cottage, her cabanon, had no running water, no heat, no electricity, and was missing a wall and almost half the roof. The rest of the place seemed held together only by weeds and brambles. Mary Ann and her family were never happier. The beauty of the olive trees, cherry orchards, marketplace and vineyards dictated the rhythm of their new lives. The process of preparing food and the sharing of it with friends and neighbors came to embody the essence of their existence on a hillside near the Mount Ventoux. Now, in this delightful and lyric meditation on Provence and its food, Mary Ann invites you to sit down at her table and share in some of her favorite recipes, the recipes of her neighbors, and her delicious memories of life in France.

Food has always been a favourite subject of the world’s artists, from still-lifes by Matisse and Picasso to the works of Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. But how do artists eat? The Modern Art Cookbook provides a window into how both great and lesser-known modern artists, writers and poets ate, cooked, depicted and wrote about food. A cornucopia of life in the kitchen and in the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the book explores a wide-ranging panoply of artworks of food, cooking and eating from Europe and the Americas – from the early moderns through the Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists up to today’s art – as well as writing about food from contemporary novelists, writers and poets. Beautifully illustrated and often surprising, this new paperback edition is a joyous guide to the art of food.

Art is seen as a solitary, even a reclusive, endeavour. But visual artists, writers and musicians often find themselves energized by a collective environment. Sharing ideas around a table has always provided a starting, and a continuing, place for fruitful exchanges between artists of all kinds.In her charming new book, Mary Ann Caws explores a rich variety of gathering places, past and present, which have been conducive to the release and sustenance of creative energies. Creative Gatherings surveys meeting locations across Europe and the United States, from cityscapes to island hideouts, from private homes to public cafes and artists’ colonies. Examples include Florence Griswold’s house in Old Lyme, Connecticut, meeting place of the Old Lyme Art Colony; Prague’s Le Louvre café, haunt of Kafka and Einstein; Picasso’s modernist hangout in Barcelona, Els Quatre Gats; Charleston, gathering place of Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; and the cafés of St-Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse: the hangouts of Apollinaire, Sartre and Patti Smith. The book interweaves 200 examples of collaborative artworks throughout the text, with 120 in colour.

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.

Over the course of her long, highly distinguished career writing about literature and art, Mary Ann Caws has excavated, illuminated and examined in depth the most intriguing works and personalities of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism and beyond. In these concise but always colourful and insightful articles, Caws brings us fresh portraits of the most famous figures and introduces us to writers and artists who merit more attention than they have received, with a special focus on female writers and artists. The author’s sensitivity to the intersections of eccentric literature and eccentric life infuses each critical essay with the human passions that these essential modernists lived. From Dickinson and Mallarmé to Duchamp and Mina Loy, Caws applies the art of close looking to shrewdly framed slices of the modernist experience.

This book gives comprehensive coverage of Woolf's reception across Europe with contributions from leading international critics and translators.The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European 'fortunes'. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which Virginia Woolf has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe.Diverse as her reception has been, as analyst of consciousness, as a decadent (censored and banned), as stylistic innovator of Modernism, as crusading feminist and socialist, and as a model for other writers, she has emerged as one of the foremost writers and principal icons of the century.Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations on them. Each volume examines the ways authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe.In doing so, it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts.

Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and articulate of the Abstract Expressionists. This book, written by a friend of the artist, the well-known writer and critic Mary Ann Caws, examines Motherwell’s way of thinking and writing in relation to his paintings. The artist, American by birth, yet simultaneously American and European in his way of visualizing and vocalizing artistic and philosophical traditions, always worked between these two poles, and it is this tension that imbues his œuvre with its particular intensity.The author bases her analysis of Motherwell on the artist’s own writings and readings, as well as on extensive conversations and interviews with him. She considers his work and interests in relation to those of other Abstract Expressionists as well as to the work of the Surrealists. Her book highlights his deep attraction to France and French literature and art, and his concern with the idea of elegy and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. His singularly American spirit provided him with a manner of painting and thinking unique among the Abstract Expressionists, as well as with a distinctive and highly personal filter through which to interpret his fascination with European literature and history.

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domènech, Marquis of Pubol, was born in Catalonia on May 11, 1904, and died on January 23, 1989. Best known as a surrealist painter, his artistic output also included film, sculpture, photography and writing. Dalí is also notorious for his eccentric behaviour and his involvement with the Dada movement, which often drew more attention to himself than his art.In this new narrative exploration of Salvador Dalí, highly respected art and literary historian Mary Ann Caws surveys the life and work of one of the most fascinating and colourful figures in the history of art. She recounts the influence of the Catalan region and dialect on his early life, as well as his expulsions from school and from the School of Fine Arts in Madrid; his involvement with the Surrealists, and his work with Buñuel and their films Un chien andalou and L’Age d’or, and the impact and reception of both films at the time. Dalí’s turbulent personal life brought him into contact with a rich assortment of intellectual figures and Caws considers his relationships with his family and his lovers, including Elena Diakonova (Gala), who was married to the poet Paul Eluard when they met, and friends such as poet Federico García Lorca.Caws also closely examines Dalí’s work: his famous Surrealist paintings, ‘hand-painted dream photographs’ such as The Persistence of Memory and Autumnal Cannibalism?, as well as his writing, photography, sculpture and film.Well-researched, and full of telling anecdotes, Salvador Dalí will appeal to the large readership who are already familiar with this extraordinary artist, as well as to those who have heard much and wish to know more about the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern art.