Posthumous Poems

These poems were written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wollstonecraft's son-in-law.

This superb bilingual anthology highlights the posthumous legacy of Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, who left a vast body of unpublished work when he died in 1973. Ben Belitt, a distinguished poet in his own right, is widely regarded as the leading translator of Neruda into English. Here he has given us a Neruda as fecund and engaged as ever, ceaselessly spinning the strands of his great, seamless life's work.

The Translation judges for the National Book Awards--Richard Miller, Alastair Reid, Eliot Weinberger--cited Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia's translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry as follows: "This, the first National Book Award to be given to a translation of modern poetry, is a recognition of Clayton Eshleman's seventeen-year apprenticeship to perhaps the most difficult poetry in the Spanish language. Eshleman and his present collaborator, Jose Rubia Barcia, have not only rendered these complex poems into brilliant and living English, but have also established a definitive Spanish test based on Vallejo's densely rewritten manuscripts. In recreating this modern master in English, they have also made a considerable addition to poetry in our language."

When Opus Posthumous first appeared in 1957, it was an appropriate capstone to the career of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.

"César Vallejo is the greatest Catholic poet since Dante—and by Catholic I mean universal."—Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain "An astonishing accomplishment. Eshleman's translation is writhing with energy."—Forrest Gander, author of Eye Against Eye "Vallejo has emerged for us as the greatest of the great South American poets—a crucial figure in the making of the total body of twentieth-century world poetry. In Clayton Eshleman's spectacular translation, now complete, this most tangled and most rewarding of poets comes at us full blast and no holds barred. A tribute to the power of the imagination as it manifests through language in a world where meaning has always to be fought for and, as here, retrieved against the odds."—Jerome Rothenberg, co-editor of Poems for the Millennium "Every great poet should be so lucky as to have a translator as gifted and heroic as Clayton Eshleman, who seems to have gotten inside Vallejo's poems and translated them from the inside out. The result is spectacular, or as one poem says, 'green and happy and dangerous.'"—Ron Padgett, translator of Complete Poems by Blaise Cendrars "César Vallejo was one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer, and this gathering of the many years of imaginative work by Clayton Eshleman is one of Vallejo's essential locations in the English tongue."—Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States "This is a crucially important translation of one of the poetic geniuses of the twentieth century." —William Rowe, author of Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life "Only the dauntless perseverance and the love with which the translator has dedicated so many years of his life to this task can explain why the English version conveys, in all its boldness and vigor, the unmistakable voice of César Vallejo."—Mario Vargas Llosa

"In these magnificent and stirring last poems, the great Yvan Goll is recording nothing less than the disintegration of the European soul, using the intellectual resources of a highly influential and cosmopolitan imagination. One of the finest and most revered poets of the twentieth century, Goll receives the tender treatment he deserves in these remarkably vivid and masterful translations."--Keith Flynn, author of 'The Golden Ratio' and 'The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory' This is the first English translation of the last poems of Yvan Goll , one of the twentieth century's finest European poets.