Winner of the 2003 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
The nameless narrator of "The Moon and the Bonfires," Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war--a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death--he finds that the past still haunts the present. "The Moon and the Bonfires" is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese's fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as "absolutely lucid and completely incantatory."

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. This volume includes translations by Fred Chappell (Alcestis), Mark Rudman and Katharine Washburn (Daughters of Troy), Richard Elman (The Phoenician Women), Elaine Terranova (Iphigenia at Aulis), and George Economou (Rhesus).

In his Rider trilogy, Mark Rudman perfected a mixed genre form -- combining dialogue, lyric and prose. While employing some of the same techniques that have become "signature Rudman" -- the compact, colloquial line, dazzling shifts from popular culture to classical history -- The Couple also breaks new ground. This new book is a collection of discrete poems organized around four poem sequences, "Long-Stemmed Rose," "The Shallowness of the Lake," "Perseus Surprised, Andromeda Unbound," and "Fragile Craft." As the title suggests, the theme of relationships, both dark and erotically-charged, emerges here as Rudman's focus. The couples in the book include parents, lovers, a young boy and girl in elementary school, Perseus and Andromeda, Mary Ure and Robert Shaw, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

In Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak's My Sister -- Life is the equivalent of The Waste Land, Spring and All, and Harmonium. But it is also accessible to the general reader, and belongs on a slender shelf of great love poems.

Written in the summer of 1917, the cycle of poems in My Sister -- Life concentrates on personal journeys and loves, but is permeated by the tension and promise of the impending October revolution. Pasternak is an uncompromisingly complex poetic stylist, and his meticulous attention to structure, etymology, and the phonetic qualities of words makes his poetry a formidable challenge for the translator. Mark Rudman renders Pasternak's poetic masterpiece with verve and intelligence.

Pasternak's poems, writes Rudman in his introduction, evoke "the constant movement and change that occurs from moment to moment and in hitherto unseen connection between disparate things". His unencumbered and startling perceptions of the world are dense, rich, and surreal:

In the orphaned, sleepless,

Dam universal waster
-- Groans tore from their posts,

The whirlwind dug in, abated.

A Sultry Night

Osip Mandelstam wrote, "To read the poems of Pasternak is to get one's throat clear, to fortify one's breathing....I see Pasternak's My Sister -- Life as a collection of magnificent exercises in breathing...a cure for tuberculosis. "The English version, which includes "The Highest Sickness", is a heady gust that matches the intensity and power of the Russian.

Powerful meditations on the nature and limits of human understanding.

Mark Rudman - poet, essayist, translator, and teacher - has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.

Powerful meditations on the nature and limits of human understanding.