For more than five decades Anthony Rudolf has been active as translator, critic, editor, and publisher: all in all, an enabler of writers and readers. His own poems come to him gradually, under pressure of real themes and subjects, refined by the disciplines of translation and co-translation. Reluctant to let a poem go, Rudolf loves to inhabit the process of writing and re-writing.European Hours represents a life's work severely curated. The poems, prose texts, and prose poems which make the cut, from 1964 to 2016, are diverse in form, and run parallel to his highly praised volumes of memoirs.George Mackay Brown, reviewing Rudolf in the Scotsman, noted his 'fine exact craftsmanship: no word or syllable wasted, so that each image is stark and true'. Robin Skelton in the Malahat Review spoke of his work as 'witty, precise, beautifully cadenced, and courageously exploratory'. Reflecting on his own influences, Rudolf mentions James Wright, Robert Creeley and Ian Hamilton early on; and later, Central and East European poets including Paul Celan, Miroslav Holub and Vasko Popa, as well as the American Objectivists.

Presenting a collection of poems that represent the author's previous concerns, this compilation combines an interest in autobiography, a return to the medium of poetry, a fascination with documentary techniques, and a new exploration of fictional possibilities. Humor and lyricism throughout enhance the anthology's themes of memory, time, and loss.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.

Break of Noon (Partage de midi) is a collaborative attempt, edited by Anthony Rudolf, at preparing an English-language edition of Paul Claudel's remarkable and complex play, an unstable text which gave Claudel many problems throughout his life. These are explored in essays by David Furlong of Exchange Theatre in London, which put on a production of the play in 2018 and John Naughton, a leading authority on Claudel. The critical apparatus is completed by the late Susannah York's essay on her own involvement with the play and recounts her interaction with her fellow translator, Jonathan Griffin. The instability of this strange and compelling work in its various original versions is mirrored by the three critical essays in the present work, which do not always see eye to eye. It is thirty years since Jonathan Griffin died and nearly fifty years since Pierre Rouve's Ipswich production of Jonathan's translation, starring Ben Kingsley and Annie Firbank.

France’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.

Journey Around My Flat is the fourth in a series of five memoirs. Previous volumes are The Arithmetic of Memory (on growing up in Hampstead Garden Suburb), Silent Conversations (where the author draws on the books in his library to generate thoughts about reading and re-reading) and A Vanished Hand (a short illustrated account of his long-lost autograph album from the 1950s). The final volume is a work-in-progress: In the Picture: Office Hours at the Studio of Paula Rego, an account of the author's ongoing close association with the painter since the two first met in 1996. Journey Around My Flat continues his practice - in the footsteps of Georges Perec and other French writers - of using objects to trigger memories. Rudolf takes the reader on a guided tour of each room in the North London flat, where he has lived for forty years, and includes a generous supply of photos. The book - running parallel to Silent Conversations - is a chronological successor to The Arithmetic of Memory, which ended with the author about to leave for university.

On 13 November 1943, Jerzy Feliks Urman (known as Jerzyk) killed himself, thinking the Gestapo had arrived. He was eleven and a half. He and his family were in hiding in Drohobycz, during the German occupation of East Galicia, now western Ukraine. A year earlier the family had quit Stanislawow in the wake of brutal round-ups and deportations of Jews. The boy's parents, uncle, and grandmother survived the war. He kept a diary and jottings during the two months before he died. Anthony Rudolf, Jerzyk's second cousin once removed, published these texts in 1991 in a translation made from a family typescript of the original. The recent discovery of the diary of Sophie Urman, Jerzyk's mother, led Rudolf to commission a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She has also revised the earlier translation of Jerzyk's own diary after comparing the typescript and the original manuscript, which is now in Rudolf 's possession. The editor has written new introductions and made extensive annotations in an attempt to clarify complex and troubling issues.Drawing attention to specific remarks and episodes, he interprets the death of Jerzyk - the only child suicide in the extensive archive at Yad Vashem - not only as the tragic action of a child under pressure but also as a noble and heroic act. Likewise, the keeping of a diary, as with Anne Frank and other children in hiding, was a form of defiance, an example of what has come to be called spiritual or cultural resistance. The book also contains two more texts by Sophie, testimonies by Jerzyk's father and uncle, maps and family photographs. It ends with Rudolf 's account of the tragic death of Mark Rothstein, another second cousin. Mark was a few months younger than Jerzyk when he died in the East End of London on 27 March 1945, during the last day of the V2 bombing raids.

A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and accompanies the newly published Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's parents. All the autographs are reproduced, among them Rudolf's summer hero, Denis Compton, and his winter hero Billy Wright. A high point is the hilarious account of the longest table tennis point ever played, triggered by the autograph of Alex Ehrlich. In addition to these three memoirs, Anthony Rudolf, born in London in 1942, has written several other books, most recently, Zigzag (2010), a volume of poetry and related prose. His writings include literary and art criticism, short stories under the narrative influence of Paula Rego and poetry translations from French and Russian. An occasional broad-caster, he was visiting lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Westminster. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association, and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.