Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as 'a superb act of restoration'. Borges himself declared, 'Four of the best things in America are Whitman's Leaves, Melville's Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes - ' Mexico in My Heart is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.

Jesus Christ, whose teachings have been on the lips of millions for two millennia, is revealed here as one of the greatest poets of all time. What happened to deafen us to the poetic nature of his words? In migrating from Aramaic speech into written Greek translation, and later into English translation, the lyrics got locked up as prose. In The Poems of Jesus Christ Willis Barnstone unveils the essential poetry of the Gospels by taking the direct speech of Jesus from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and lineating and titling Jesus's words as individual poems. Jesus's poems are wisdom lyrics and narrative parables, rich with garden, animal, and nature imagery. Austere and poignant, they carry the totality of the Gospels' message through the intensity of a single voice--the Gospel of Jesus.

Many critics regard the work of Saint John of the Cross (1542-91), the 16th-century mystic, to be among the finest poetry Spain has produced. This bilingual edition, the first in modern English, was originally published in hard cover in 1968 by the Indiana University Press. Most of these poems were written during a period of nine months, in 1577-78, when Saint John (San Juan de la Cruz) was imprisoned and tortured in the dungeon of a small Carmelite monastery in Toledo, and their recurrent motifs are both metaphysical and deeply personal.

This expanded edition of "The Gnostic Bible" includes the "Gospel of Judas" - the recently discovered and translated Gnostic text that was an instant best seller on its original appearance in 2006 - in its most accessible translation yet. Also included in this work are such important and topical texts as the "Gospel of Mary Magdalene" and the "Gospel of Thomas". Religious thinkers engaged in the quest for wisdom and knowledge, the Gnostics proclaimed that salvation could be found through mystical knowledge and intuition. Dating from the first to the thirteenth centuries, the texts in "The Gnostic Bible" represent Jewish, Christian, Hermetic, Mandaean, Manichaean, Islamic, and Cathar forms of Gnostic spirituality, and they derive from Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, China, France, and elsewhere.

First published in the 1950s to international acclaim, Margarita Liberaki's allegorical novel, The Other Alexander, speaks to the opposing forces inherent in human nature. This exquisite poetic drama reenacts Greek tragedy in its evocation of a country riven by civil war and a family divided against itself. A tyrannical father leads a double life; he has two families and gives the same first names to both sets of children. In an atmosphere of increasing unease and mistrust, the half-siblings meet, love, hate, and betray one another. Embroiled in absurdity, Liberaki's characters must confront their doubles, as individual and collective identity is called into question in this tale of psychological and political haunting. Hailed by Albert Camus as true poetry, Liberaki's sharp, riveting prose, with its echoes of Kafka, consolidates her place in European literature. Considered one of Greece's most distinctive voices, Margarita Liberaki is essential reading.

Sappho's thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years - certainly a record for poetry of any kind - and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English.In the past, translators have taken two basic approaches to Sappho: either very literally translating only the words in the fragments, or taking the liberty of reconstructing the missing parts. Willis Barnstone has taken a middle course, in which he remains faithful to the words of the fragments, only very judiciously filling in a word or phrase in cases where the meaning is obvious. This edition includes extensive notes and a special section of 'Testimonia': appreciations of Sappho in the words of ancient writers from Plato to Plutarch. Also included in this title are a glossary of all the figures mentioned in the poems, and suggestions for further reading.

Deeply admired by poets far more familiar to us, from Lorca to William Carlos Williams, the poems of Miguel Hernandez (1910-42), written in the midst of the savage 20th century, beam with a gentleness of heart. Hernandez was a self-educated goatherd from the tiny Spanish town of Orihuela who tried hard to be accepted among his older contemporaries. Lorca wrote to the young poet in 1933, telling him to stop struggling to get along in a 'circle of literary pigs'. After fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Hernandez was imprisoned in several of Franco's jails, where he continued to write until his death from untreated tuberculosis on 28 March 1942: he was only 31. Miguel Hernandez is now one of the most revered poets in the Spanish-speaking world. From his early formalism, paying homage to Gongora and Quevedo, to the final poems, which are passionate and bittersweet, Hernandez' work is a dazzling reminder that force can never defeat spirit, and that courage is its own reward. Pablo Neruda called him 'a great master of language - a wonderful poet'.

A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet by the prize-winning poet and translator.

Sappho's thrilling lyric verses have been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years--certainly a record for poetry of any kind--and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique endures to be discovered anew by each generation, and to inspire new efforts at bringing the spirit of her Greek words faithfully into English.

This book is adapted from a book previously in hardcover as Sweetbitter Love.

The world's greatest poetry resides in the Bible, yet these major poets are traditionally rendered into prose. In this pioneering volume, Willis Barnstone's translations restore the lyricism and power of the poets' voices in both the New and the Old Testaments. In the Hebrew Bible, we hear Solomon rhapsodise in Song of Songs; David chant in Psalms; God and Job debate in grand rhetoric; and prophet-poet Isaiah plead for peace. Jesus speaks in wisdom verse in the Gospel, Paul is a philosopher of love and John of Patmos roars majestically in Revelation, the Bible's epic poem. This ground-breaking volume includes every major biblical poem from Genesis and Adam and Eve in the Garden to the last pages of Alpha and Omega in Paradise.

Antonio Machado (1875-1939) is Spain's master poet, the explorer of dream and landscape, and of consciousness below language. Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado--like his contemporary Rilke--is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collection, the unparalleled translator Willis Barnstone, returns to the poet with whom he first started his distinguished career, offering a new bilingual edition which provides a sweeping assessment of Machado's work. In addition, "Border of a Dream" includes a reminiscence by Nobel Laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez and a foreword by John Dos Passos.

from "Proverbs and Songs"

Absolute faith. We neither are nor will be.
Our whole life is borrowed
We brought nothing. With nothing we leave.
*
You say nothing is created?
Don't worry. With clay
of the earth make a cup
so your brother can drink.

Born near Seville, Spain, Antonio Machado turned to a career in writing and translating in order to help support his family after the death of his father in 1893. His growing reputation as a poet led to teaching posts in various cities in Spain and, eventually, he returned to finish his degree from the University of Madrid in 1918. He remained in Madrid after the outbreak of civil war, committed to the Republican cause, but the violence finally forced him to flee. He died an exile in France.

Willis Barnstone is one of America's foremost translator-poets, bringing into English an extraordinary range of work, from Mao Tse-tung to the New Testament.

Ancient Greek Lyrics collects Willis Barnstone's elegant translations ofGreek lyric poetry -- including the most complete Sappho in English, newlytranslated. This volume includes a representative sampling of all the significantpoets, from Archilochos, in the 7th century BCE, through Pindar and the other greatsingers of the classical age, down to the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods.William E. McCulloh's introduction illuminates the forms and development of theGreek lyric while Barnstone provides a brief biographical and literary sketch foreach poet and adds a substantial introduction to Sappho -- revised for this edition-- complete with notes and sources. A glossary and updated bibliography areincluded.

When Pedro Salinas' 1933 collection of love poems, "La voz a ti debida", was introduced to American audiences in Willis Barnstone's 1975 English translation, it was widely regarded as the greatest sequence of love poems written in any language in the twentieth century. Now, seventy-five years after its original publication, the reputation of the poems and its multifaceted writer remains untarnished. A portrait of their era, the poems, from a writer in exile from his native civil war - torn Spain, reemerge in our time. In this new facing-page bilingual edition, Barnstone has added thirty-six poems written in the form of letters from Salinas to his great love, Katherine Whitmore. Discovered years later, these poems were written during and after the composition of La voz and, though disguised as prose, have all the rhythms and sounds of lineated lyric poetry. Taken together, the poems and letters are a history, a dramatic monologue, and a crushing and inevitable ending to the story of a man consumed by his love and his art. Bolstered by an elegant foreword by Salinas' contemporary, the poet Jorge Guillen, and a masterly afterword by Salinas scholar Enric Bou that considers the poet and his legacy for twenty-first-century world poetry, "Love Poems by Pedro Salinas" will be cause for celebration throughout the world of verse and beyond.

"Life Watch: A Circle of Ninety-One Nights "is an ambitious sequence of -poems that begins in childhood, moves through Barnstone's adult years, and returns to youth. The poems engage and reflect on the civil wars that the author found himself in the midst of, Mexican orphanages, the cafes and arts salons in Paris, and walking with Borges. As the circles of these poems widen, they gather many perspectives on a life watched.

Willis Barnstone has taught at universities in Greece and Argentina and authored more than 40 books--poetry collections, poetry translations, philosophical and religious texts. "The New Covenant, his literary translation of the New Testament," was published in 2001 (Riverhead Books).

In a lucid, pioneering volume, Willis Barnstone explores the history and theory of literary translation as an art form. Arguing that literary translation goes beyond the transfer of linguistic information, he emphasizes that imaginative originality resides as much in the translation as in the source text-a view that skews conventional ideas of artistic primacy. Barnstone begins by dealing with general issues of literalness, fidelity, and originality: with translation as metaphor, aesthetic transformation, and re-creation. He looks as well at translation as a traditionally stigmatized genre. Then he discusses the history of translation, using as his paradigm the most translated book in the world, the Bible, tracing it from its original Hebrew and Greek to Jerome's Latin and the English of Tyndale and the King James Version. Citing the way authors intentionally mistranslate for religious and political purposes, Barnstone provides fascinating insights into how, by altering names in the Gospels, the Virgin Mary and Jesus cease to be Jews, the Jews are turned into villains, and Christianity becomes an original rather than a mere translation. In the next section Barnstone analyzes translation theory, ranging from the second century B.C. Letter of Aristeas to Roman Jakobson's linguistic categories and Walter Benjamin's "Task of the Translator." The book ends with an aphoristic ABC of translating.

This title presents the first English-language translation of the ill-fated Uruguyan erotic poet Delmira Agustini.This graceful translation and bilingual edition, now in paperback, is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death on July 6, 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Caceres and including work from each of Agustini's four published books, ""Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros"" is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited.Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on October 24, 1886 to wealthy parents of German and Italian descent. She published her first volume of poetry when she was twenty-one and followed with two more in the next six years: the fourth volume was a posthumous publication. Her life was cut short in 1914, when Enrique Job Reyes, her ex-husband, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself.Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini's development and strengths as an artist - including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them - and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Caceres' introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini's work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

The Apocalypse (1st-2nd century C.E.) is attributed to John of Patmos. It is revealed by a succession of angels, asserting that God will intervene decisively in the present evil age and reward his long-suffering elect. Reflecting the Roman occupation and oppression of the Jews, and influenced by the apocalyptic writings in the Old Testament's Book of Daniel, The Apocalypse is the great epic poetic work of the New Testament. As the translator Willis Barnstone puts it, "Like the Book of Job, The Apocalypse is an extended poem, as densely poetic as Blake's Jerusalem, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, or Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland". Here reissued in a Bibelot edition, it is rendered in blank verse, remarkably translated by Willis Barnstone, the distinguished scholar, translator, and poet.

Jesus Christ, whose teachings have been on the lips of millions for two millennia, is revealed here as one of the greatest poets of all time. What happened to deafen us to the poetic nature of his words? In migrating from Aramaic speech into written Greek translation, and later into English translation, the lyrics got locked up as prose. In The Poems of Jesus Christ Willis Barnstone unveils the essential poetry of the Gospels by taking the direct speech of Jesus from Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and lineating and titling Jesus's words as individual poems. Jesus's poems are wisdom lyrics and narrative parables, rich with garden, animal, and nature imagery. Austere and poignant, they carry the totality of the Gospels' message through the intensity of a single voice--the Gospel of Jesus.

Included are The Song of Songs Poems (Sappho) The Cosmic Fragments (Herakleitos) Saying Poems (Yeshua the Messiah) Apocalypse (John of Patmos) Taoist and Buddhist Poems (Wang Wei) Allegorical Bestiary (Bishop Theobaldus) Mystical Poems (Mira Bai) Mystical Poems (St. John of the Cross) Sonnets to Orpheus (Rainer Maria Rilke) The poetry included here spans three thousand years and contains some of the most profound and inspiring writing of world literature: some following the way of fantastic realism while some is mysto-erotic. As Barnstone says: "[I]n the instance of our authors, the unsayable has been refashioned into the precision of poetry."