Clearing the Ground illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca." The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics." 
 Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical pensée, these "Notes" were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, according to the eminent critic G. P. Savidis, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language in certain cases, in any language. 
 The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming.
 The afterward by Martin McKinsey examines Cavafy's sexuality and accompanying pressures in historical context and suggests the part they may have played in his poetic breakthrough. 
 This is a revelatory work for students and lovers of Cavafy one of the great outsider poets of the twentieth century.

Clearing the Ground: C. P. Cavafy, Poetry and Prose, 1902-1911

Literature & Fiction

C.P. Cavafy

Martin McKinsey

History & Criticism

Laertes, A Press For Literary Translation, Inc.

Perhaps the first full-throated response to the war in Kosovo to be published in English, this anthology in a Serbian translation crossed the border between the two countries in 2014 as one of the first works to break a literary silence of three decades. 
 Every play included here even the two comedies proceeds from traumatic circumstances or the wake of them: 
 Set in the thick of the NATO bombing and the forced expulsion from Pristina, The Basement is a family drama in which every inclination and every snap reaction can have an unbearable effect. 
 The Finger draws its impetus from a vacuum, from a family bereft, and the implacable dynamics between two women. In it a disappearance calls for and exacts rituals in the gap between life and death. 
 In the monodrama, Slaying the Mosquito, exile carries with it all the derangement of the war, enacted in the person of the poet-madman-shaman, a tormented spirit caught between diverse worlds. 
 The eponymous One Flew over the Kosovo Theater is an uproarious lampoon. Set in the days approaching the independence of Kosovo, it takes aim at the new government and their yen for censorship and the appropriation of the arts. 
 Recapitulating the occupation and conflict, The Crossroads Café is a sweeping farce with a full cast of characters, including Serbian Police and guerrilla fighters, together with an Everyman trapped in the machinations. 
 One Flew over the Kosovo Theater is more than a collection of plays. It is something that verges on a saga.

One Flew Over the Kosovo Theater: An Anthology of Contemporary Drama from Kosovo

Jeton Neziraj

Dramas & Plays

Pascoli stands in the doorway. He is both a last romantic and Italy’s first modern poet. Beloved for his poems of family and the nest, he is also one of the first voices of modern depth psychology. Steeped in the Italian landscape and drawn into the spell of little creatures, he catches the natural world with scientific accuracy, becoming one of our earliest ecological poets. A revolutionary who writes with emotion about the rural poor, he also reports on the first wave of Italian immigrants to the new world. This collection assembles Giovanni Pascoli’s central and prophetic study of the imagination, O Little One, an extensive selection of poems delineating his long career, and a late and previously untranslated essay on the poetry of dead languages. The translator’s introduction examines Pascoli’s place as a liminal figure, situated at the conjunction of multiple worlds, casting a visionary light on whatever he beholds.

Giovanni Pascoli: O Little One and Selected Poems

Giovanni Pascoli

Translator: John Martone

Poetry

How does a writer translate war? And when the war is over, how does the individual reconstruct his world from the ruins? Bajraj lives in Mexico, in exile since the war in Kosovo, and a lot of his poetry is equally attentive to both the desire and the loneliness inherent in that fate. —Ani Gjika Bajraj’s poems capture the troubled voice of the foreigner in a strange land; a place tethered, painfully and inextricably, to the past. Bajraj’s Mexico City, populated by fallen angels and the ghosts of the poet’s war-torn past, is an uneasy place, one in which even the most mundane of activities is tinged with darkness. Visions of violence intermittently break the flow of words, rendered all the more forceful by their sparse simplicity. This selection of short poems, like small windows into a world in which neither the reader nor the poet is entirely at ease, allow us to contemplate the brutal melancholy of war, exile, and their lingering effects. —Alice Whitmore

We Fall Like Children

Xhevdet Bajraj

Ani Gjika

Alice Whitmore

Translator

From a master of modernist literature, Thanassis Valtinos, this volume collects two ground-breaking novellas that altered the trajectory of Greek fiction, together with two autobiographical short stories. Here Valtinos maps the fates of his native Peloponnesian villagers through odysseys of departure and historical upheaval. Set in the early twentieth century, "The Book of Andreas Kordopatis" records the repeated attempts of the narrator to emigrate to America. Wrought from a first-hand account, it offers a revelatory view of the struggles of the undocumented in that era. "The Descent of the Nine" is a civil war drama that details the attrition of nine Communist rebels trapped in government-controlled territory. In Addiction to Nicotine the onset of adolescence interfuses with the last stages of the leftist grip on the countryside. Aistratigos offers the keenly sketched portrait of a veteran, whose privation, in war and affection, has led to an almost mystical reclusiveness.

Thanassis Valtinos: Early Works

Thanassis Valtinos

Jane Assimakopoulos (Translator)

Stavros Deligiorgis (Translator)

Literary

Review\nMohamed Metwalli's A Song by the Aegean Sea transports us to Turkey's Aegean coast where a tourist described as an "Egyptian poet" observes scenes of city life from his "6th floor balcony / [i]n the Izmir Palace Hotel." Told in three sections spanning a year (each poem is dated from three trips taken in June 2013, January 2014, and June 2014), a mostly omniscient narrator paints scenes based on the poet's travels. 
A title like "Jump Cut" alludes to the collection's cinematic framework with local characters reappearing and storylines carrying through across several poems, and we learn that the tourist had wished for "stronger lighting / For scenes unworthy of filming / In his life." In the final poem, "Farewell," the speaker observes "the carcass of a dove / Struck by lightning in front of my very eyes." 
Gretchen McCullough's collaborative translation with Metwalli is full of remarkable phrases, from winter's "skittish sun" to 
[...] ships seeping their light 
From afar 
Silver and gold on the surface of dark waters 
In her introduction, McCullough notes that Metwalli composed his original text, first published in 2015, in "formal standard Arabic, not colloquial," which made me wonder whether the translation is reaching for a slightly archaic register of English. Many poems land on an emphatic exclamation point reminiscent of older poetry, moves that feel akin to making a black-and-white film in homage to the classics. 
In "A Raven, a Moon," the speaker enters into conversation with the city itself and considers what to do with "a drunken, orange half moon," musing about whether to send it skipping "on the surface of the water ... [o]r puncture it until it lands on the bed of the sea." Metwalli delights in metaphor; in "Strange Language," the speaker observes how a date "primped herself, / her mirror, the page of the sea," before they board a "boat with no intention to depart." 
REVIEWED BY LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES--LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES﻿ "Poetry Foundation"\nA Song by the Aegean Sea is a song for the unsung heroes of the coast of Izmir, Turkey, or Smyrna, that cosmopolitan city through the different ages. The book celebrates the underbelly of the city; the gypsies selling flowers, the roving musicians, the mussel-sellers, and the protestors. The elements of the city’s coastline are also merged with the characters in an impressionistic, yet surreal canvas from a stranger’s point of view. The traveler, i.e., the poet, or the singer of the Aegean song yearns to become part of the scene.

A Song by the Aegean Sea: A Book of Poetry

Metwalli, Mohamed

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