Eliot (EDT) Weinberger

In 1990, the Swedish Academy awarded Octavio Paz the Nobel Prize in Literature for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity. Paz is a writer for the entire world to celebrate (Chicago Tribune), the poet-archer who goes straight to the heart and mind, where the center of being is one (Nadine Gordimer), the living conscience of his age (Mario Vargas Llosa), a poet-prophet, a genius (Harold Bloom). Here at last is the first retrospective collection of Paz 's poetry to span his entire writing career, from the first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem; the whole is assiduously edited and translated by acclaimed essayist Eliot Weinberger who has been translating Paz for over forty years with additional translations by several poet-luminaries. This edition includes many poems that have never been translated into English before, new translations based on Paz 's final revisions, and a brilliant capsule biography of Paz by Weinberger, as well as notes on the poems in Paz 's own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his life.

As Eliot Weinberger states in his introduction, from the moderns onwards, the juxtaposition of disparate elements, and the making of the strange through dislocation became an essential part of poetry. In here Weinberger chooses a few examples of a collage pasted onto an unfamiliar landscape. This is part of the Poetry Foundation's comprehensive "Poets of the World" series.

This unique volume presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers: his extraordinary non--fiction prose. Borges' unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his essays, reviews, lectures, and political and cultural notes, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen; Shakespeare and the Kabbalah; the history of angels and the history of the tango; the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism Chosen International Book of the Year by George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement