Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

It will come as a surprise to some readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture--though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work--have scarcely been translated into English.

The first major book of short prose poetry in Spanish, Eagle or Sun? (Aguila o Sol?) exerted an enormous influence on modern Latin American writing. Written in 1949-50 by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun? has as its mythopoeic "place" Mexico a country caught up in its pre-Columbian past, the world of modern imperialism, and an apocalyptic future foretold by the Aztec calendar. Indeed, three personae of the book--the goddess Itzapaplotl, the prophet clerk, the poet are manifestations of the threefold aspects of the land. Paz himself explains: "Eagle or Sun? is an exploration of Mexico,...

With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, John Frederick Nims, and Charles Tomlinson.

Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's premier long poem Sunstone is now a handsome illustrated paperbook. Presented here in a new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem that helped established Paz as a major international figure. Includes beautiful illustrations from an 18th-century treatise on the Mexican calendar.

For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing.

In Karmic Traces,...

A rich compendium of translations, The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry is the first collection to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Weinberger begins with Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), and includes translations by three other major U.S. poets -- William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder -- and an important poet-translator-scholar, David Hinton, all of whom have long been associated with New Directions. Moreover, it is the first general anthology ever to consider the process of translation by presenting different versions...

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and...

"Nostalgia for Death" is the sole book of Villaurrutia, who was one of the few openly homosexual Latin American writers and one of Mexico's most important authors of the early twentieth century. "The latest of Eliot Weinberger's brilliant translations of Latin American poets brings to English the major volume of an impeccable Mexican modernist."--"Booklist"

George Oppen s New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poet s books published in his lifetime (1908 84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, whose writing was championed by Ezra Pound when it was first published by The Objectivist Press in the 1930s, has become one of America s most admired poets. In 1969 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous, which The New Yorker recently said is unmatched by any book of American poetry since. The New Collected Poems is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of...