Bücher veröffentlicht von Contra Mundum Press

Adonis in the Pyrenees: another "conversation in the mountains" where a multiplicity of orients and occidents intermingle, where dialogue between Adonis, the major Arab-language poet at work today, and Pierre Joris, nomad poet between the United States, Europe, and North Africa, becomes polylogue, exchanging reflections that range from the destructive role all monotheisms play in history - in relation to woman, but also to the power structures throughout cultures - to questions of poetics and the possible role of the spiritual in contemporary poethics. These conversations - under the general title "Religion is an answer, poetry a question" - took place in June in the small village of Germ-Louron in the French Pyrenees in the context of "Les Porteurs de Mots /The Word-Carriers," an annual cultural festival organized by Franck Morinière. These conversations were framed by a range of events, musical & theatrical performances, poetry readings and talks.Adonis dans les Pyrénées: autre "conversation dans les montagnes" où une multiplicité d'orients et d'occidents s'entremêlent, où un dialogue entre Adonis, le plus important poète de langage arabe au travail aujourd'hui, et Pierre Joris, poète nomade entre l'Europe, les Etats-Unis et le Maghreb, devient polylogue, échange de réflexions allons du rôle destructeur que jouent tous les monothéismes dans l'histoire - par rapport à la femme, mais aussi aux structures de pouvoir de toutes les cultures - à des questions de poétiques et du rôle possible d'une spiritualité dans la poéthique contemporaine. Ces conversations - sous le titre de "La religion est une réponse, la poésie une question" - eurent lieu en juin 2017 dans le petit village de Germ-Louron dans le Pyrénées dans le contexte d'un festival culturel annuel, "Les Porteurs de Mots," organisé par Franck Morinière. Conversations encadrées par un essaim d'évènements: performances musicales et théâtrales, lectures de poésie, et exposés. This is a bilingual English/French edition.

In April of 1864, Baudelaire departed Paris for Brussels with something of a massive shipwreck in his wake: his major work, Les fleurs du Mal, had been condemned and censored a decade earlier, many of his other works were out of print, and he pawned his prized Poe translations to gain much needed survival money. Fearful of being imprisoned for debt, the poet who was an outcast in Paris would soon become a pariah in Brussels. Not long after his arrival, rumors spread that he was a spy reporting on Republican exiles on behalf of the French police. While encountering a pestiferous city in the midst of redevelopment, and after failing to secure a publisher for his work, Baudelaire would begin writing notes for his projected book on Belgium. In his catalogus rerum of Brussels and the Belgians, the general overruling condition is one of blandness and dissolution: with observations ranging from those of a sociologist to an anthropologist, city planner, and aesthete, through Baudelaire's fleeting eye, we witness his examination of physiognomy, cultural and political customs, Belgium's fear of annexation by France, & more. Deemed a mean-spirited and even xenophobic book by figures such as Derrida, Baudelaire himself spoke of it as a sketch and satire that had the double advantage of being a caricature of the follies of France and a simulacrum of a Democratic state. As he attempted to complete his project on Belgium as well as other works, Baudelaire suffered violent attacks of neuralgia, then, in early 1866, he was plagued with more attacks, dizzy spells, and nausea. After a cerebral stroke, he was left hemiplegic and mute. In this veritable full-scale examination of every aspect of life in Belgium, Baudelaire's perspectival eye catches a world in a glance. The poet's plethora of notes and vast collection of related newspaper clippings (summarized within) reveal to us the inner workings of his mind, what Blake called the artist's Infernal workshop. Belgium Stripped Bare is an aesthetico-diagnostic litany of often vitriolic observations whose victory is found in the act of analysis itself, in the intoxication of diagnosis, just as great comedians exult in caustic and biting observations of society, a slap in the face of the status quo.

Shattering the Muses, Rainer J. Hanshe’s third book, is a hybrid entity constructed of quotes, poetry, short essays, and visual art, including original works created expressly for the book by Italian artist Federico Gori. Fragmentary and elliptic, aphoristic & apothegmatic, Shattering the Muses explores, if not enacts, the eclipsing of the logos and creative force within individuals as well in the spheres of culture & civilization. Spanning a broad range of history, Shattering the Muses stages the fundamental chiasmic unity of creation and destruction as it occurs in individuals, whether a result of choice, tragic events, and/or social, religious, or political exigencies. It also enumerates the destruction of individual artworks, museums, and the various biblioclasms enacted by numerous cultures from biblical times till today. When do individuals and cultures rise out of catastrophe and destruction, and when do they descend into silence, either temporarily, or (possibly) permanently, and thus remain forever shattered If language or the creative force is a dwelling place, conversely, when it disintegrates, or is rendered inoperative, or when we as individuals or as a civilization are split from it — this is the ultimate form of the Unheimlich, an extreme cataclysm out of which there is often no return. Hanshe proposes that “apocalypses” are not eschatological, but ontological, ever-present, continuous events that threaten us. Hope before disaster, creation in the midst of inevitable evaporation. Shattering the Muses is a paean to the book, a work of mourning and of threat, where the fragility of consciousness, of art as a positive power, is an ephemeral but stalwart citadel against barbarism.

In his proto-memoir Innocent, world-renowned actor Gérard Depardieu reflects on his life as if from afar, like a bird surveying a wide horizon, presenting fervent observations on friendship, cinema, religion, politics, and more. From his early days in the theater and his friendships with Jean Gabin and others to his rise in the cinema, this light, vibrant, but searching book offers us an intimate entry into the thinking process of one of cinema's most mercurial and impassioned actors. Depardieu also touches upon controversial topics such as his relationship with Putin and issues that have led to skirmishes with the press and public. At bottom, Innocent is less a memoir and more the account of a man in search of faith, the faith that is of an innocent mystic, and includes passages about Depardieu's explorations of Islam, Buddhism, and other religions. Espousing a notion of innocence that calls us to move beyond dogma and ideology, Depardieu urges us to engage with others with respect, receptivity, and mindfulness. In these combative and divisive times, we believe this is a vital if not necessary book, one that could continue and extend dialogues about questions of faith, politics, and religion.

Maura Del Serra is a poet, playwright, translator, and essayist whose work is highly regarded in Italy and Europe where it has garnered numerous accolades. Following her anthology Coral (1994) and the critically acclaimed collections of poetry L'opera del vento (2006) and Tentativi di certezza (2010), Ladder of Oaths contains poems and other texts Del Serra composed between 2010 and 2015. Ladder of Oaths further develops and enriches the author's ars poetica - while rooted in classical Western & Eastern traditions, Del Serra's spiral-like gaze extends from cosmo-metaphysical openings to both autobiographical & civic themes. The architectural and polytonal character of her poetry is born of more than three decades of intense and convergent activity as a writer who embodies the multiple nuclei of a thinking poetry. Entrusted to a passionate and metaphoric inventive ductus, Del Serra's work is dialogical and has a choral transitivity whose rhythms are as rigorous as her style is refined. Such is evident both in her free verse and in her haikus and aphorisms, not to speak of the vibrant, dream-like lyricism of "For Elisa," the poème en prose that closes the present collection. This is the first book of Del Serra's to be translated into English since Infinite Present in 2002.

Black Renaissance, the second volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is the continuation of Miklos Szentkuthy’s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy’s Virgil, an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite. Through St. Orpheus’ method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. “Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions,” says Szentkuthy, “is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.” In Black Renaissance, the dramatic scenes and philosophical passages (never a fog of abstractions, more the world and tone of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) parade before the reader ostensibly as three characters, by way of three Orphean masks: Renaissance and baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi, architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi, and a tutor to the young Elizabeth Tudor. From Monteverdi’s impassioned search for an opera subject in the works of Tacitus to his meditations on divinities, to Brunelleschi’s diving into the works of Herodotus so as to illustrate Greek history, Szentkuthy veers through the Renaissance, sounding a pessimistic ‘basso continuo’ on psychology, sin, metaphysics, truth and relativism. Through Orpheus’ final mask, that of the tutor of Elizabeth, it is eros and theology, two of Szentkuthy’s fundamental concerns, that receive yet another complex and engrossing dramatization. Metaphysics, Rationalism, and existentialist despair all spin through the author-narrator’s kaleidoscope as he closes his Black Renaissance by discoursing on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. A thousand attempts at defining physical and spiritual, heavenly and earthly love all fail.

Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard's "years of memory," these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, his monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, complementing and extending its themes. Like Histoire(s), they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and, ultimately, the nature of love.Gathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: "Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details... Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that aren't in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren't literature or cinema. Traces of a film..."In our era of ubiquitous streaming video, ebooks, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions for the future of media, cinematic, literary, and otherwise.

Narcissus, or The Lover of Himself is a play of staggering mediocrity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, better known as a social thinker than as a playwright, claims to have written it as a young man of eighteen, some twenty years before it was performed for King Louis XV on December 18, 1752. It flopped and never saw the stage again in Rousseau's lifetime.In his preface to the play, penned after its failed production, Rousseau avows that he kept himself from publishing it for as long as he held onto some regard for his reputation as an author. This is a fairly measured judgment, for a work the caliber of Narcissus would certainly not bolster Rousseau's status. The plot, characters, language, and comedic elements come off as weak or incomplete. Hence, the reader (or spectator) could understandably question the play's merits, and the need to publish it.But had Narcissus never been, neither would its preface. This afterthought, two decades in the making, becomes, in many ways, a much more interesting opening act to the comedy that follows. It is rich in philosophy and criticism, madly buzzing with paranoia, and surprisingly convincing in its proposition that the arts and sciences, the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of letters, and all the trappings of civilization are destructive forces, harmful to man's morality. It is an apology for having experimented with writing literature in his foolish youth and, at the same time, a justification for the existence of his art. The preface, in which he writes, "I must, despite my reluctance, speak of myself," is fully narcissistic. Peering over Rousseau's shoulder, we, too, see his reflection: a man with reason on his side, standing against his enemies, his age, and, indeed, the world.Daniel Boden's translation of Narcissus and its preface is true to the voice, times, and incongruities of Rousseau. In the afterword that crowns this edition, Simon Critchley situates the play and preface in their historical context, makes connections to other works by Rousseau, comments on the philosophy put forward in the preface, reflects on what brings the classics to the stage, and proposes, quite simply, that theater is narcissism.

The talk should be interrupted every now and then in my opinion. Disrupt, dismember, disperse. Right, says the First Voice. To not to lose ourselves too much in our voice, our exuberance, our memories, our moments. Especially in the flow of time, says the Second Voice. Time meaning the events that surround us, says the First Voice. Also to resist the drift of words, says the Second Voice. To stay all by ourselves, says the First Voice. To the best of our ability, says the Second Voice. To protect our integrity, says the First Voice. To the best of our ability, says the Second Voice. And our reality, says the First Voice. They remain silent. Then: *... In your dream you can be the one who kills, but he, I mean your victim, I mean the one killed, with whose voice could he shout? With his own voice of course, says the First Voice.How could that be? says the Second Voice. Is there another within yourself? You're the one who saw the dream. He, I mean your victim, I mean the one killed, I mean the one you killed, is a dream being, I mean one who can only be in your dream, I mean, more precisely, a non-being being. But he shouted, says the First Voice. Possible, says the Second Voice. But only you can hear his scream. I, on the other hand, can only hear your scream.*...a whole, broken up, some of its pieces have vanished, only some pieces remain. Or a useless (almost) single piece. Can a whole be formed with it? Based on it, can a whole be remomented? Recreated?

In 1979, Josef Winkler appeared on the literary horizon as if from nowhere, collecting numerous honors and the praise of the most prominent critical voices in Germany and Austria. Throughout the 1980s, he chronicled the malevolence, dissipation, and unregenerate Nazism endemic to Austrian village life in an increasingly trenchant and hallucinatory series of novels. At the decade's end, fearing the silence that always lurks over the writer's shoulder, he abandoned the Hell of Austria for Rome: not to flee, but to come closer to the darkness. There, he passes his days and nights among the junkies, rent boys, gypsies, and transsexuals who congregate around Stazione Termini and Piazza dei Cinquecento, as well as in the graveyards and churches, where his blasphemous reveries render the most hallowed rituals obscene. Traveling south to Naples and Palermo, he writes down his nightmares and recollections and all that he sees and reads, engaged, like Rimbaud, in a rational derangement of the senses, but one whose aim is a ruthless condemnation of church and state and the misery they sow in the lives of the downtrodden. Equal parts memoir, dream journal, and scandal sheet, the novel is, in the author's words, a cage drawn around the horror. Writing here is an act of commemoration and redemption, a gathering of the bones of the forgotten dead and those outcast and spit on by society, their consecration in art, and their final repatriation to the book's titular graveyard.

Our Street, Sándor Tar's fifth book, is comprised of thirty-one stories centered on the inhabitants of Crooked Street, the tail end of a small village in southern Hungary bounded at one end by a down-and-out bar where most of the characters find their consolation in alcohol, banter, sex, yearning for love, and recounting far-flung tales. Each story of Our Street reflects on and extends the next, whereby a gallery of memorable characters emerge to reveal even more, an incisive portrait of a society in disintegration.Honing in on each character's struggle to salvage their self-respect after the demise of communism and the 1989 regime change, Tar dramatizes the difficulties of survival as the people of Crooked Street face the loss of their jobs, the soil from under their feet, and their hopes. This gallery of distinctive characters includes Uncle Vida, an old man who grows vegetables he cannot sell, the always proud Mancika, who is found lying on the tracks waiting for a speeding train, and the reverend Márton Végs¿, who tends to the needs of the villagers with an equanimity that springs from resignation rather than moral or spiritual resolve. Through these and other figures, one is drawn into a world both captivating and harrowing. Yet the stories are told with such humor, understanding, and sympathy that the book reaffirms the characters' humanity and endows them with dignity.Our Street takes us into terrain that most would not have known were it not for Sándor Tar. As the first translation into English of one of Tar's books, Anglophone readers will at last come to understand why many contemporary Hungarian authors have expressed unreserved admiration for his writing.

Featuring an extended introduction by scholar of British Romanticism, Alan Vardy, Fragments consists of Wordsworth's philosophico-aesthetic prose fragment "The Sublime & the Beautiful" and "Hawkshead & the Ferry." While a fragmented text, unfinished, almost certainly abandoned by the author, the difficulties of the former text no longer appear fatal so much as evidence of Wordsworth's rigorous struggle to come to terms not only with his own aesthetic experiences, but with the philosophical aesthetics of his epoch. What were once read as confusions may now be seen as productive of complex accounts of lived affective experiences. In critical terms, current aesthetic occupations have perhaps finally found Wordsworth's text.By placing the prose fragment in a separate appendix, the original editors of Wordsworth's Prose Works removed it from its actual place in The Unpublished Tour. New analysis of the manuscripts reveals that "The Sublime & the Beautiful" is actually part of the Tour. In reprinting the "Hawkshead & the Ferry" section of the Tour, our edition restores this original context, lost in the standard Oxford edition. The prose fragment begins in the precise place where "Hawkshead & the Ferry" ends - on the west side of Windermere looking north to the Langdale pikes. Were the missing pages of "The Sublime & the Beautiful" to be recovered, the transition from picturesque viewpoint to speculation on the philosophical status of that view would be apparent.Understanding the significance of our affective response to natural objects could not be more central to a Wordsworthian poetics predicated on the internalization of aesthetic sensations into perceptions and ideas, associations of one kind or another, and finally into the very stuff of the poetry. Fragmented or not, this prose treatise on a subject of such centrality to the poet's project can no longer be ignored. It is this general neglect that the present text hopes to address by publishing these fragments on their own for the very first time.

The Transformation Book, which belongs to Pessoa's pre-heteronymic period, contains a series of fragments written in English, Portuguese, and French, none of which were ever published during Pessoa's lifetime.Conceived by Pessoa in 1908, a year of great social and cultural transformation in Portugal, The Transformation Book was designed to reflect and advance social and cultural transformation in Portugal and beyond. Moving between a number of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and satire as well as essays on politics, philosophy, and psychiatry, The Transformation Book marks one of the fundamental stages in Pessoa's elaboration of a new conception of literary space, one that he came to express as a "drama in people." Alexander Search, Pantaleão, Jean Seul de Méluret, and Charles James Search are the four "pre-heteronyms" to which the texts of The Transformation Book are attributed. These four figures constitute a plural literary microcosm - a world that Pessoa makes, but that is occupied by a multiplicity of authors - and clearly anticipate the emergence of Pessoa's heteronyms. As the singular result of an intersection of Pessoa's personal intellectual trajectory with his hopes for fomenting cultural transformation, The Transformation Book makes for a unique contribution to Pessoa's ever-growing published oeuvre.Although some of the texts conceived as part of the Transformation Book have previously been published in isolation or as fragments, this is the first complete and critical edition of The Transformation Book, and most of the texts in this edition are published here for the first time. Through the critical efforts of Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, a fundamental project of Fernando Pessoa's is now brought from the confines of the archive to the public in its most complete and accurate fashion. The Transformation Book should contribute to future studies on the work of one of the most distinctive geniuses of modernist literature.

Unique in Hungarian literature, at the time of its first appearance in 1935, Towards the One & Only Metaphor was greeted with plaudits by such leading Hungarian critics as László Németh, András Hevesi, and Gábor Halász, with Németh declaring: "Szentkuthy's invention has the merit that he pries writing open in an entirely original manner. . . Where everything was wobbling the writer either joins the earth-shaping forces, or else he sets up his culture-building laboratory over all oscillations. Seated in his cogitarium, even in spite of himself, Szentkuthy is brother to the bellicose on earth in the same way as a cloud is a relative to a plow in its new sowing work."Szentkuthy referred to this nearly unclassifiable text as a Catalogus Rerum, "an index that is of entities and phenomena, a Catalogue of Everything in the Entire World." In a sequence of 112 shorter and longer passages, Szentkuthy has recorded his experiences and thoughts, reflected on his reading matter as well as political, historical, and erotic events, moving from epic subjectivity to ontological actualities: "Two things excite me: the most subjective epic details and the ephemeral trivialities of my most subjective life, in all their own factual, unstylized individuality - and the big facts of the world in their allegorical, Standbild-like grandiosity: death, summer, sea, love, gods, flowers."Similar in kind to the ruminative waste books of Lichtenberg and the journals of Joubert, while Towards the One and Only Metaphor is a fragmentary text, at the same time, it is ordered, like a group of disparate stars which, when viewed from afar, reveal or can be perceived to form a constellation - they are sculpted by a geometry of thought. Szentkuthy conjures up and analyzes spectacle and thought past and present with sensitivity, erudition, and linguistic force. As András Keszthelyi observed, the text is essentially something of a manifesto, "an explicit formulation of the author's intentions, his scale of values, or, if you wish: his ars poetica." Through dehumanization, Szentkuthy returns us to the embryo and the ornament, but so as to bring us into the very particles of existence. Towards the One and Only Metaphor is also a confessional, a laying bare of the heart, even through masks, but in moving beyond the torpid self-obsession that rules our age, Szentkuthy's revelations yield forth the x-ray of a typus, and like Montaigne and Rousseau, he is equally revealing, entertaining, and humorous. Now available in English for the first time, Towards the One & Only Metaphor is destined to stand as one of the principal works of world literature of the 20th century.

In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches, he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic, incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most significant European authors working today.

In a century replete with radical politics, final liberations, historical codas, and dreams of eternity, the shadowy figure of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the constant revolutionary, wrote Eternity by the Stars in the last months of 1871 while incarcerated in Fort du Taureau, a marine cell of the English Channel. In the midst of contemplating his confinement, Blanqui devises a simple calculation in which the infinity of time is confronted with the finite number of possible events to suggest a most radical conclusion: every chain of events is bound to repeat itself eternally in space and time. Our lives are being lived an infinity of times across the confines of the universe, and death, defeat, success and glory are never final. For the world is nothing but the play of probabilities on the great stage of time and space. By straddling the boundaries of hyperrealism and hallucinatory thinking, Blanqui's hypothesis offers a deep, tragic, and heartfelt reflection on the place of the human in the universe, the value of action, and the aching that lies at the heart of every modern soul.This first critical edition of Blanqui's incantatory text in English features an extended introduction by Frank Chouraqui. Exploring sources of Blanqui's thinking in his intellectual context, Chouraqui traces the legacy of the text in critiques of modernity devoting particular attention to the figures of Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Borges. It features copious illuminating annotations that bring out the web of connections which interlace the great marginal figure of Blanqui with more than two millennia of European culture.

Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by ¿thousands of philosophies,¿ all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoäs musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoäs future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a ¿poet animated by philosophy.¿ Through editor Nuno Ribeirös careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity¿s most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.

Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final texts by the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self. This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. "If Ghérasim Luca's speech is eminently poetic," Deleuze pronounced, "it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T'AIME PASSIONNÉMENT." Transformed for the first time into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this bi-lingual edition of Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism. In addition, it is the first book of Luca's verse ever to be translated into English."Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own." -Deleuze "Mary Ann Caws' passionate translations render deft, delightful facets of the formidable Ghérasim Luca: virile servings of refreshment and tumult, liberating language from the yoke of Duty. This collection pairs and contrasts well with the churning self-surgery we had the pleasure of smuggling from Romanian. Self-Shadowing Prey calls for vertiginous reading, in exhilarating reflection of the sonorous scintillations of Luca's own reading performances." -Julian and Laura Semilian, translators of Ghérasim Luca's The Inventor of Love & Other Works

Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy''s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy''s Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, anendless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite.Through St. Orpheus'' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems."Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist''s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life & more his intellectual mission, the sole determinantof his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th centuryand its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary onCasanova''s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy''s very own philosophy of love.Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity anda taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.