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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.9911
EAN num: 9780811215114
ISBN number: 0811215113
Label: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 80
Printing Date: 2002-04
Publishing house: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Sale Popularity Level: 195944
Studio: New Directions Publishing Corporation
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Product Description:
The debut collection in English translation of a leading voice of the new Albanian poetry. Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku introduces to English-speaking readers the arresting work of Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of Albania's foremost younger poets. Born in Elbasan in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family's opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She was not permitted to attend college or publish her poetry until the weakening and eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the early '90s. She is among the very first generation of poets to emerge out of the cultural wasteland of enforced socialist realism in the arts, reinventing Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. In a voice at once firm yet quiet and spare, with haunting imagery that challenges the imagination, her highly charged poems carry the burden of her own and her country's past. For Fresco, editor Henry Israeli has gathered fifty-seven poems from Luljeta Lleshanaku's published books (The Sleepwalker's Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; Antipastoral, 1999) as well as some newer work. His Afterword places her writing within its personal and social context, while an Introduction by the award-winning translator Peter Constantine views the poet from the wider perspective of modern Albanian literature. The poems themselves are translated by Henry Israeli in collaboration with the author and Uk Zenel Buçpapa, Noci Deda, Joanna Goodman, Alban Kupi, Albana Lleshanaku, Lluka Qafoku, Shpresa Qatipi, Qazim Sheme, and Daniel Weissbort. Many of the translations have appeared in such magazines as Grand Street, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, and Quarterly West.
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Rated by buyers -
Ably edited and translated into English from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and others, and enhanced with an informed and informative introduction Peter Constantine, the poetry by Luljeta Lleshanaku compiled in Fresco: Selected Poetry offers a voice that is clear, strong, and remarkably apolitical for someone who whose family were brutally oppressed during decades of Albanian communist regimes. Yearly Snow: In this city the yearly snow/leaning on sparse, lonesome trees/doesn't mean a thing./It signifies nothing more/than the meandering of a veteran/leaning on a wooden crutch.//The same war story told a hundred times/the same brand of cigarette distributed by friendly hands/and those same eyes hovering, dark and lazy./Only that. And the dry rhythmic knocking/until his silhouette disappears/amidst the shadows cast down by rooftops/their melting snow dripping/in terrible slowness...
Rated by buyers -
How to make poetry out of the nightmare of recent Albanian history? Luljeta Lleshanaku explores some of the ways in which public and private realms of experience meet and merge, in poems that haunt and delight in equal measures. What was once forbidden now comes into sharp focus, as in the mingling of philosophy, erotic memory, and religious imagery in the title poem, "Fresco."
These poems, these dark essays in ecstasy, see much farther than we can imagine.
Rated by buyers -
How to make poetry out of the nightmare of recent Albanian history? Luljeta Lleshanaku explores some of the ways in which public and private realms of experience meet and merge, in poems that haunt and delight in equal measures. What was once forbidden now comes into sharp focus, as in the mingling of philosophy, erotic memory, and religious imagery in the title poem, Fresco.
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