Copies of the Poems & Fragments of Alcaeus, translated into English by the poet and novelist R J Dent, and published by Circaidy Gregory Press, are now available to buy at Atlantis Books in Santorini.
Atlantis Books is a truly amazing bookshop. It’s on the Main Marble Road in Oia, Santorini. Inside, it’s a bibliophile’s treasure-trove.
Alcaeus’s Poems & Fragments has made its way across the world and onto a shelf of Greek poetry and literature in Atlantis Books. It’s almost as though Alcaeus has gone home.
Here’s Alcaeus alongside Philip Sherrard, Dionysios Solōmos, Arthur Machen, Homer, and other distinguished Greek and Anglo-Greek authors and scholars.
Atlantis Books in Oia, Santorini, is one of the bibliophile wonders of the world. There is no other bookshop quite like it.
It’s fitting that Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments is now available to lovers of Greek poetry and Greek literature – on a Greek island as beautiful as Santorini, and in a bookshop as unique as Atlantis Books.
Atlantis Books, Main Marble Road, Oia, Santorini, Cyclades, Greece.
Alcaeus was a fellow countryman and contemporary of Sappho, and his beautiful and delicate poetry is often overshadowed by Sappho’s reputation. R J Dent has now translated all of Alcaeus’s Poems & Fragments from ancient Greek into lively modern English in an attempt to rescue Alcaeus’s ethereal poetry from obscurity.
There is no other published translation of Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments in existence.
Paperback ISBN 978-1-906451-53-0 £7.49. Orders available to trade and retail customers from http://www.circaidygregory.co.uk or to trade via Nielsen Teleorders. Contact sales@circaidygregory.co.uk for discount and SoR terms.
Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments (in paperback and kindle formats) is now available from Amazon, and in all other eformats from all i-stores. Orders available to trade from Gardners and Baker and Taylor.
Here’s a recent review of Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments:
264 pages, 22 half-tones, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 Series: Solar Books – Solar Nocturnal
Paper $16.95
ISBN: 9780982046487
‘A new, definitive edition of Lautréamont’s influential masterpiece. Vividly translated by R J Dent.’
‘Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldoror [is] the black bible… almost the basic dream text of surrealism.’ J G Ballard
‘The Songs of Maldoror is an enigma of redoubtable power.’ Jacques Derrida
The Songs of Maldoror is ‘the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.’ André Breton
Le Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse (1846–70), a Uruguayan-born French writer and poet whose only surviving major work of fiction, The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), was discovered by the Surrealists, who hailed the work as a dark progenitor of their movement. It was in The Songs of Maldoror that André Breton discovered the phrase that would come to represent the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance: “as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table.”
Le Comte de Lautréamont
Artists inspired by Lautréamont include Man Ray, René Magritte, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and, in particular, Salvador Dalí, who in 1933 produced an entire series of illustrations for The Songs of Maldoror. Twenty of those illustrations are included, for the first time, in this new, definitive edition of Lautréamont’s influential masterpiece. Vividly translated by R J Dent – the first new translation for over thirty years – this edition also includes a foreword by French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and a concise biography of the author by poet Jeremy Reed. In addition, an introduction by series editor Candice Black details the links between Maldoror and the Surrealist movement.
The Songs of Maldoror is a poetic novel (or a long prose poem) consisting of six cantos. It was written between 1868 and 1869 by Le Comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse. During the early 1900s, many of the surrealists (Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Max Ernst) cited the novel as a major inspiration to their own works. The Songs of Maldoror – and the book’s protagonist Maldoror – have continued to fascinate readers since its publication.
Here is a short promotional film of an extract from The Songs of Maldoror.
Here’s R J Dent’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. It was published by Solar Books on January 9th 2009. According to the blurb it’s ‘a brand new translation that vividly brings Baudelaire’s masterpiece to life for the new millennium’.
R J Dent says: ‘This particular translation was a labour of love; it started years ago, when I studied Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal as an undergraduate and realised how inaccurate the available translations were. I promptly set about translating twenty or so of the best poems, particularly the banned ones. In the process, I very quickly came to admire Charles Baudelaire’s poetic voice. It was refined and dignified, and yet very daring. I now understand these contradictions, if that’s what they are.’
‘I found the translation process itself very interesting. Because Baudelaire’s writing is very visual, it was almost like time-travel; I wandered around 19th century Paris, absorbing the sights, sounds, scents; was taken into the bedrooms of many dusky women, all of them sprawled across their beds, dressed only in jewels and perfume.’
‘When I had finished the translation, I was back in the 21st century. I couldn’t wait to get back to Baudelaire’s Paris. The translation process itself was very much like archaeology. I had the French text and I would work at it steadily, uncovering its buried English meaning, word by word, line by line, until finally, the whole poem would stand naked before me in all its pristine glory. That’s Baudelaire’s poetry for you. If only all translation work was like that.’
‘Incidentally, I very much enjoyed translating the introductory essay by Guillaume Apollinaire, which is now available in English for the first time.’
‘Solar Books has done a great job with The Flowers of Evil. With it they’ve included a new version of Artificial Paradise, which is a series of Baudelaire’s reflections on wine, hashish and opium.’
Odilon Redon’s cover picture, which he painted specifically for The Flowers of Evil, perfectly captures the zeitgeist of Baudelaire’s 19th century Paris.
The Flowers of Evil & Artificial Paradise
Charles Baudelaire
Translated by R J Dent
SOLAR BOOKS
ISBN-10: 0-9799847-7-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-9799847-7-8
Publication date: January 2009
The Flowers of Evil can be ordered from Solar Books at:
