Enric Valor is one of the most important Valencian authors of the 20th century. This selection of his highly popular rondalles (folk tales) will for the first time introduce his work to an English-speaking audience. At a time when Catalan was under threat from the cultural bulldozer of the Franco regime, which condemned the use of anything but Castilian Spanish in public communication, Valor went to great lengths to disseminate knowledge of the language, through writing grammars and linguistic studies, as well as teaching it to fellow inmates when he was imprisoned by the regime for his cultural activities. These tales, collected over a number of years in small villages in the province of Alacant, were a significant part of his ongoing efforts to safeguard the Valencian language and the culture and history of the region. The Rondalles Valencianes have been compared to Italo Calvino's Italian Folk Tales and Henri Pourrat's Treasury of French Folk Tales. Like them, Valor aimed in rewriting the oral material to establish a common national body of folk narratives and to make the stories more appealing to Valencian readers, young and old alike. The critical Introduction provides an outline of the author's life and an overview of his work as novelist, grammarian and folklorist, as well as an assessment of the tales which identifies their place within the broader European folklore tradition.

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the author's Selected Writings series, guides readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years - not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival - and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's oeuvre responds enables him to put down 'multiple roots' in a number of literary traditions, and this is reflected in the book's diversity. It sets out not only to be of use to readers and scholars already acquainted with Berengarten's poetry, but as a guide to those who are encountering his work for the first time.It is divided into three main sections, the first of which approaches the work thematically and the second chronologically, while the third focuses on his 'Balkan trilogy' (The Blue Butterfly, In A Time Of Drought and Under Balkan Light). The book also contains an appendix of essays on Berengarten's ancillary roles as literary activist, EFL teacher/entrepreneur and teacher of poetry to children, as well as a detailed bibliography.