Richard Sieburth – författare

This newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems is intended to articulate Pound for the twenty-first century. Gone are many of the “stale creampuffs” (as Pound called them) of the 1949 edition. Instead, new emphasis has been laid on the interpenetration of original composition and translation within Pound’s career. New features of this edition include the complete “Homage to Sextus Propertius” in its original lineation, early translations from Cavalcanti, Heine, and the troubadours, as well as late translations of Sophocles, and the Confucian Odes.As a lifelong expatriate, Pound parceled out his work to a variety of journals in England, America, France, and Italy. This new edition takes account of this complex publishing history by giving the poems in the chronological order of their original magazine publication. We can observe Pound as he first emerges onto the literary scene in the pages of Ford Madox Ford’s English Review and Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based Poetry, and then as an agent provocateur for the avant-garde Little Review, Blast, and The Dial.Unlike all previous selections, this volume provides annotation to all the early poems as well as a running commentary on the later Cantos — indispensable to any reader wanting to follow Pound on his epic odyssey through ancient China, medieval Provence, the Italian Renaissance, the early American Republic, and the darkness of the twentieth century. The editor, Richard Sieburth, provides a chronology of Pound’s life, a new preface, and an informative afterword, “Selecting Pound.” Also included in the appendix are T. S. Eliot’s and John Berryman’s original introductions to Pound’s Selected Poems.

This is the first large-scale English translation of Maurice ScÈve's poem cycle DÉlie, originally published in Lyons in 1544 and only rediscovered in the early twentieth century as one of the great forgotten masterpieces of French poetry. A contemporary of Sir Thomas Wyatt in England, Sceve occupies a crucial place in the history of French verse between the late medieval tradition of Marot and the more self-consciously Renaissance poetics of the PlÉiade. Powerfully registering the early impact of Petrarch's Rime in France, ScÈve's canzoniere nonetheless establishes itself as a strongly independent and fiercely idiosyncratic series of 449 love poems addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Delie. Often considered a sixteenth-century MallarmÉ because of the radiant obscurity of his verse, Sceve emerges in these English translations as a poet whose passionate ironies can be compared to such English metaphysicals as Donne while at the same time evoking the oblique self-portraiture of John Ashbery.Introduced and annotated by the prize-winning translator Richard Sieburth, this bilingual selection from ScÈve's DÉlie (which also includes the fifty emblems illustrating the original edition) will appeal not only to students of French literature and lovers of poetry but also to the broader audience of readers drawn to the visual and verbal universe of the Renaissance.Honorable Mention, 2003 Weidenfeld Translation PrizeHonorable Mention, 2003 PEN Poetry Translation Award

Vivifying poetry of nature and the spirit — explore a mystical world of hawkmoths and elvers, skylarks and salamanders, with the shimmering grace of Gary Snyder"Lehnert's imagination is precise, patient, yearning... [it] documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary SupplementWickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.