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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.
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Catan
(16)
R1,150
R889
Discovery Miles 8 890
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