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Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliché, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the "right thinking" swaddle their minds. After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as a Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, the Dictionnairewas long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each "accepted idea" Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirist's wit and a scholar's precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.

From the wager between God and Mephistopheles and the pact Faust makes with the latter-that this genial, urbane devil could have his soul if ever Faust became satisfied with any experience or knowledge Mephistopheles could show him-the drama unfolds in scenes that are human and compelling, that hold the reader by their despair and ecstasy, their tender love, passionate desire and wisdom, but also by their gaiety, humor, and irony. As Faust proceeds with his devilish guide, it is his striving for understanding that becomes important, not the attainment, and in fact this is what saves him in the end.Part I of Faust, which Goethe published twenty-four years before its sequel, deals with Faust's journey through the everyday world and his love for Gretchen. It is made especially memorable in this translation, which Victor Lange, Chairman of the Department of German at Princeton, has called "certainly the most usable and most appealing Faust translation in English. It is modern without losing the dignity of the original and is perhaps the only translation that conveys something of the freshness and poetic vitality of Goethe's own speech."

The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters--Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov."

There are a number of English translations of The Dhammapada, but this version by Irving Babbitt, for many years professor at Harvard and founder, with Paul Elmer More, of the movement known as "New Humanism," concentrates on the profound poetic quality of the verses and conveys, perhaps more than any other, much of the vitality of the original Pali text. Babbitt devoted many years to this translation--it was a labor of love. Together with his essay on "Buddha and the Occident," which is also included in this edition, The Dhammapada was one of the basic components of his view of world history, a view which has influenced leaders of thought as diverse as Newton Arvin, Walter Lippmann, David Riesman and T. S. Eliot. Eliot, indeed, once wrote that "to have been a student of Babbitt's is to remain always in that position."

"What a clear, insistent health there is here--as if the so-called world were seriously the point, which it is, and we could actually live in it, which we do. Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what's for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous." -Robert Creeley

A reissue of Ferlinghetti's very short experimental plays (1965) with three new plays added to the original thirteen. In this collection Ferlinghetti takes a revolutionary look at modern theater and explores the area between old-style drama and spontaneous improvisation by supplying a blueprint for dramatic actionan outline from which director and actors may create and interpret freely. In one called '"Our Little Trip" two men in conservative suits wind themselves in and out of a long bandage while a questioner circles them seeking Meaning. "Servants of the People" puts on political podium hogs in torrents of cliches. "Bearded Lady 'Dies'" features the Second Coming all decked out for newspaper coverage.

Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, Kora and Ka and Mira-Mare, are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual brand of modernist story-telling, pushed beyond personality. The men and women who haunt these tales are wraiths in spiritual exile, wanderers in a Europe still recovering from the devastations of World War I. Her descriptions of the beaches at Monte Carlo are triumphs of vivid detail - bright watercolors set against brooding psychological portraits. In its exploration of the broken dualities of self and civilization, Kora and Ka looks forward to H. D.'s masterpieces, Tribute to Freud and Trilogy.

Gathered here are versions of Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) that differ in some respects from their original small-press editions. In a long preface, "Frame Structures," written especially for this volume, Howe suggests the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical motifs that suffuse these early works. Taken together, the preface and poems reflect her rediscovered sense of her own beginnings as a poet, her movement from the visual arts into the iconography of the written word.Susan Howe is a professor of English at the State University of New York-Buffalo. Most of her later poetry has been collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (New Directions, 1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), and Singularities (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). She is also the author of two landmark books of postmodernist criticism, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) and My Emily Dickinson (North Atlantic Books, 1985).

Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her "The Lobelias of Fear":...but how will we, still alive, socializein the winter? wrapped in bear skinswe'll sit around pot-bellied stoves eatingthe lobelias of fear left over from desperation,last summer's woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of blackcherries eaten in a hurrywhile the yard grows in the moonlightshrinking like a salary ...

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlets" series, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a fun, humming, bio-physiological word-whizzing flight into birdsong penned by young Canadian poet, Sylvia Legris - her first publication in the U.S.An excerpt:The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premiseof red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen.Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.

Even in a state of geometrical grace we cannot see time as it is, only as it passes. So the river shows us while softly disfiguring our waterlogged bodies on the way to vast projects of war.-Rosmarie WaldropDriven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop's sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, "Sway-Backed Powerlines," consists of five sequences of prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the second Iraq war to geometry, memory, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, investigates the tendency to abstraction in our lives which, in the West, began with the Renaissance introduction of zero into arithmetic, the vanishing point into perspective, and imaginary money in economics. Driven by the tension between abstraction and the concrete, and written in the shadow of ongoing wars, these poems are among Waldrop's most engaging and thrilling works to date, the writing of a master poet at the height of her creative powers.

The humble but heroic figure of St. Francis (1182-1226), who gave up wealth and security to espouse a life of poverty, an apostolic existence as much like Christ's as possible, attracted a strong and immediate following. In a series of vivid vignettes, The Wisdom of St. Francis and His Companions portrays the lives of the original members of the Franciscan community--the childlike innocence of their faith, their brave self-denial and acute sayings, and the sometimes comic effects of their simplicity. St. Francis himself was a poet, and his work, together with the picturesque episodes of his extraordinary life, evoke a perennial response--as witness his revered "Canticle to the Sun."

Called by some the French Borges, by others the creator of le nouveau roman a generation ahead of its time, Raymond Queneau's work in fiction continues to defy strict categorization. The Flight of Icarus (Le Vol d'lcare) is his only novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions. Consciously parodying Pirandello and Robbe-Grillet, it begins with a novelist's discovery that his principal character, Icarus by name, has vanished. This, in turn, sets off a rash of other such disappearances. Before long, a number of desperate authors are found in search of their fugitive characters, who wander through the Paris of the 1890s, occasionally meeting one another, and even straying into new novels. Icarus himself--perhaps following the destiny his name suggests--develops a passion for horseless carriages, kites, and machines that fly. And throughout the almost vaudevillian turns of the plot, we are aware, as always, of Queneau's evident delight at holding the thin line between farce and philosophy.

This is the first presentation in depth of the work of one of the most influential writers of modern France, Jules Supervielle (1884-1960). Up to now, only an occasional selection has appeared in an anthology, and he is still little known to American readers. Yet Supervielle is one of the unique creators of our time. His fables have the clear-eyed, slightly wry vision of the intelligent child. His poems have a Iucidity of language that throws new light on each word, each thought. In his novel The Man Who Stole Children, complete in this volume, he uses the fantastic premise that a child uncared for by its parents may simply be picked up off the street and adopted, to illuminate man's problems of human behavior and emotion. Supervielle in his poetry and prose, as in his personal influence on other writers, is quiet, unassuming, matter-of-fact. There is a quietness, too, almost an impersonality about his approach to life and the events of every day. His poems are statements and almost never is there the fireworks of imagery or startling figure of speech that one associates with some twentieth-century schools of writing. Throughout his work may be felt the vast spaces of Uruguay, where he was born, and of the sea, a pervading symbol. This edition contains eight of his stories. translated by Enid McLeod, more than forty of his poems with French text en face translated by James Kirkup, Denise Levertov, and Kenneth Rexroth, and the complete novel, Le Voleur d'enfants, translated by Alan Pryce-Jones.

Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling."One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."

"Bloom and change your way of living," Xi Chuan exhorts us. "Bloom / unleash a deep underground spring with your rhizome." In his wildly roving new collection, Bloom & Other Poems, Xi Chuan, like a modern-day master of the fu-rhapsody, delves into the incongruities of daily existence, its contradictions and echoes of ancient history, with sensuous exaltations and humorous observations. Problems of mourning and reading, thoughts on loquaciousness, Manhattan, the Luxor Temple and socks are scrutinised, while in other poems we encounter dead friends on a visit to a small village and fakes in an antique market. At one moment we follow the river's flow through the history of Nanjing, in another we follow an exquisite meditation on the golden. Brimming with lyrical beauty and philosophical intensity, the collection ends with a transcript of a conversation between Xi Chuan and the journalist Xu Zhiyuan that earned seventy million views when broadcast online. Award-winning translator Lucas Klein demonstrates in this remarkable bilingual edition that Xi Chuan is one of the most electrifying international poets writing today.

Maman was exigeante-there is no English word-and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge's, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite, so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests. One should cultivate weavers of tweed in the Outer Hebrides but have the cloth made up in London; one should buy linen in Ireland but have it made up by a Thai seamstress in Paris (whose genius has been supported by purchase of suitable premises). All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds all assumptions overturned. Will she be able to fend for herself? Will the dictates of good taste suffice when she must deal, singlehanded, with the sharks of New York?

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.

The celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi explores connections between language, life, and the natural world

Peter Weiss's first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop's stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house-stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup music box-which have oblique characters' shadows as their supporting cast. Described by Weiss as a "micro-novel," The Shadow of the Coachman's Body can be obscene, trivial and brutal, and yet it is also peculiarly intimate and offers endless possibilities-like a telescope and kaleidoscope rolled into one.

Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents-the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in such a fantastic manner? Weiss's strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-double backflip before neatly landing. This essential rediscovered work, from the masterful and acclaimed German modernist Peter Weiss, will be a delightful discovery for readers of Kafka, Musil, and Gombrowicz.

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, "remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms."This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad's poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America's promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront-its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations-in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus.Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.

Eugenio de Andrade is the author of twenty-nine volumes of poetry as well as numerous children's books, collections of prose writings, and translations into Portuguese of Sappho, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Yannis Ritsos. Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade, is based on the poet's own retrospective Antologia Breve ("Brief Anthology") of 1998, expanded and edited for English-speaking readers by his longtime translator, Alexis Levitin.Marguerite Yourcenar spoke of "the well-tempered clavier" of Andrade's poems, Gregory Rabassa of his "succinct lyricism...summing things up in a moment, much like haiku." His verse, deeply rooted in the rural landscapes of his childhood and in the ancient Greek lyric, have the clarity of light on sand, radiating pagan intimations of immortality.

A four-pack of our Spring 2014 Poetry Pamphlets, featuring:The Albertine Workout, by Anne CarsonDerangements of my Contemporaries, by Li ShangyinThe Iceland, by Sakutaro HagiwaraThe Poems of Osip Mandelstam

The first four collections in our revitalized Poetry Pamphlet series, established to highlight original work from writers around the world as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history.Included are: Two American Scenes: Our Village & A Journey on the Colorado River, by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger; Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, by Susan Howe; The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer; and Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris.

As wide a following as the late Thomas Merton had while he lived, ever since his tragic accidental death in Bangkok in 1968, there has been a steady upsurge of interest in both his life and writings. A priest and Trappist monk by vocation, his theological works have been instrumental in reforming Western monasticism and in carrying on the religious dialogue between East and West; an enormously productive poet, his poems display an astonishing technical versatility and deeply felt humanity. Merton's stature as a critic, however, was not fully appreciated until the publication in 1981 of the first full collection of his distinctly literary essays, now available as a paperbook. The fifty-six pieces included in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton present every known article by the author, though written for the most part during the last years of his life. The mature Merton ranges across the modern literary landscape with impressive ease. Joyce, Pasternak, and Zukofsky are only a few of the authors discussed in "Literary Essays (1959-68)." These are followed, in turn, by "Seven Essays on Albert Camus"; nine essays "Introducing Poets in Translation"; and "Related Literary Questions," linking Merton's literary thought with his aesthetic, religious, and social concerns. His earlier work, such as his 1939 Master's thesis on Blake as well as newspaper and periodical reviews written prior to 1941, are included in appendices; to these are added transcripts of two talks he gave on Faulkner in 1967. The Literary Essays were collected and edited by Brother Patrick Hart, Father Merton's secretary at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

This is a companion volume to the Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth which was published in 1967. All of the long poems written over the past forty years are included: The Homestead Called Damascus (1920-25), A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy (1925-27), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-44), The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-50) and The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967-68). As we read the long poems together and in sequence we can see that Rexroth is a philosophical poet of consequence who offers us a comprehensive system of values based on the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility. He is concerned, above all, with process: the movement from the Dual to the Other. "I have tried," Rexroth writes," to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of creative process. I hope I have made it clear that the self does not do this by an act of will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it."

Once again, the setting for many of the pieces is the Green Mountains of Vermont, where the poet and his family have lived for several years. A member of the editorial board of The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to numerous periodicals, he is the editor of the recent comprehensive paperbook anthology The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (1970).