Novel about a foul-mouthed powerhouse of a woman novelist who holds up her publisher for a million-dollar advance when she's dying of cancer and wins readers' hearts.

Jo Stern

SLAVITT, David R.

Harper&Row

For centuries, men and women have turned to the Psalms more frequently than to any other book in the Bible. The reasons are not hard to find. With their passionate lyricism, their wild fluctuations between faith and fear, and their marvelous, incantatory rhythms, the Psalms provide the most extended and deeply personal treatment of the human call to God. The emotional power of such prayers, and the literary artistry with which they are expressed, are as compelling today as they were 2000 years ago. That power and artistry are made magnificently apparent in Sixty-One Psalms of David. This is not so much another translation as an inspired and engagingly fresh rendition of the Psalms. Following the tradition of Ezra Pound's versions and Robert Lowell's Imitations, David R. Slavitt--himself an esteemed poet and translator of Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and others--casts the Psalms into a modern idiom that stays faithful to the original but strikes the ear remarkably like contemporary speech. Perhaps the most innovative and immediately appealing feature of these renditions is Slavitt's skillful use of traditional poetic forms. Here the Psalms are compressed, clarified, and given the satisfying shapes and textures of English poetry. Working most often in rhymed tetrameter quatrains, but also employing rhymed couplets and other forms, Slavitt brings all the subtlety and expressive power of English versification to these Psalms, and the result is a poetry that fits comfortably in the lineage that includes Sir Philip Sydney, John Donne, William Blake, and Richard Wilbur. Metrically supple, vividly physical, and marked by felicitous phrasing throughout, these renditions preserve the spiritual directness of the originals while giving readers the added pleasures of a new, and seemingly effortless, formal variety. As poet and Jewish folklorist Howard Schwartz has observed on this collection, "In Slavitt's hands the Psalms become an intense, one-sided conversation with God. They cohere in the only way a fine book of poems can, unified by the poets voice. The full range of emotion emerges, especially fear, disgust at the foibles of humanity, loathing of one's enemies, and awe and trust in God." Readers well familiar with the Psalms will want to have Slavitt's new renditions alongside the Bible on their shelves, as a highly inventive and illuminating counterpoint. And readers coming upon these verses for the first time will feel themselves blessed to discover poetry and prayer so beautifully joined.

Sixty-One Psalms of David

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Oxford University Press

Solomon ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021--ca. 1058) was the greatest of the Spanish Jewish poets and an important neoplatonist philosopher. Translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century, his philosophical work became influential among scholars who were unaware that Avicebron (as his last name was Latinized) was a Jew and a celebrated writer of religious hymns. The Royal Crown (or, "A Crown for the King" in Slavitt's translation) is the greatest of Gabirols poems. Bernard Lewis has called it one of the major works of Hebrew literature since the completion of the Old Testament. Its theme is the problem of the human predicament: the frailty of man and his proclivity to sin, in tension with a benign providence that must leave room for the operation of man's free will and also make available to him the means of penitence. The Royal Crown is still printed in prayerbooks of the Sephardic rite for the Day of Atonement, and among North African Jewish communities (and their offshoots in Israel and elsewhere) it is read communally before the morning service of the Day. In northern Europe and the West this custom has lapsed, however the Royal Crown is still used for private penitential reading. David Slavitts inspired translation of this classic poem into contemporary English--printed with the Hebrew text on facing pages--will make the Royal Crown newly available and accessible to students and scholars of medieval Jewish literature and philosophy and to the general public as well.

A Crown for the King

Literature & Fiction

Gabirol, Solomon Ibn

History & Criticism

This is a glittering new translation of the portion of the Hebrew Bible known as the Book of the Twelve Prophets, or the Twelve "Minor" Prophets. In the Bible, the books of the prophets are arranged in rough order of length. The present group of writings thus appears after the so-called "major" prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and includes the much shorter texts of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. At the time when all biblical books were written on scrolls, these twelve brief prophetic texts were traditionally written on a single scroll, and so came to be considered a single book. "Minor" with respect to length only, they are from the literary point of view some of the most interesting texts in the Bible--passionate, visionary, and written with genuine literary sophistication. David Slavitt's brilliant modern translation breathes fresh life into these powerful ancient texts.

The Book of the Twelve Prophets

Children's Books

Vital signs: New and selected poems

DOUBLEDAY

The liberated

Vital signs : new and selected poems

Three elderly women--an actress, a brothel madam, and a woman named Alice--dine at the Savoy and discuss Alice in Wonderland, in this fictional exploration of the lives of Lewis Carroll's three favorite photographic models

Alice at 80

1987, Doubleday, NY. Hardcover edition, 268 pages. David R. Slavitt is a well known, respected novelist. Here, he takes an in-depth look at the life and times of physicians.

Physicians Observed

Propertius in Love: The Elegies

These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls "Cynthia." Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.

University of California Press

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Books by SLAVITT, David R.