Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is now recognized as one of Europe’s supreme poets. He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily amb
"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fuse
After Nature, W. G. Sebald’s first literary work, now translated into English by Michael Hamburger, explores the lives of three men connected by their restless questioning of humankind’s place in the natural world. From the efforts of each, “an orde
Biographies can never be wholly objective or comprehensive; for by selecting which facts will receive emphasis, a biographer is bound to underplay those aspects which he considers to be less important. Hence, a volume such as this will allow readers to co
Before publishing the sensuous and scandalous poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) had already earned respect as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. This stimulating selection of criticism reveals him as a worshipper a
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards an
Although best known for his collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire was also a gifted and inventive prose writer. In combining certain of the restrictions of poetic form with the freedom of prose, he sought a form of language capable of convey
Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortal
Controversial book of verse, first published in 1857, presented in a handsome dual-language edition, together with superb selection of great French poet's other works: prose poems from "Spleen of Paris," critical essays on art, music, and literature, as w
