Product Description
Nineteen different translations of a single poem with comments on each version by Eliot Weinberger and introduction contributed by Octavio Paz. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Review of Weinberger's Wang Wei
The concept of this book is very useful. It demonstrates perfectly the versatility of a Chinese ideogram, and presents the development of the poem through historical perspective. Unfortunately, the brevity of the poem and commentary on the translations make this a really light reading--maybe 45 minutes. Is it really worth $10?

The Impossible
The question inevitably arises when you are reading translations of poems from long ago from very different cultures - does this bear any resemblance at all to the poet's intent?Apart from the obvious practical difficulties, there is a vast difference in subconscious cultural assumptions. Why would someone write something down at all? It has something to do with the culture's beliefs about what matters and in that context what needs to be said. In the East, "emptiness" had a significance it doesn't have here.I think it derives from a personal experience of inner hopelessness, a facing an abyss within when you realize you have nothing of your own, and that all your character traits and virtues are worthless tricks in the face of your ultimate fate.The only remedy is to turn to that which is above. In the poem discussed in this book, that is the sunlight that returns to a piece of moss, as it rakes through the woods at sunset.

Anyway, this book is a rather fun romp through 19 attempts to bring Wang Wei's meditation to the West. My own inklings about the poem were best expressed in what Octavio Paz had to say about his own translation. Most of the rest are undermined with brief and very funny observations by Weinberger. I doubt very much that any translation is likely to do the poem justice. Our culture doesn't value the experience of silence enough. We're definitely not looking for revelations about what a moment of inner silence shows. The need for noise is too great, need for noise and need for praise.

But I think that is what Wang Wei was meaning to state, silence reflected, and really there is nothing in Western poetry that I know of that makes a declaration like this with such exquisite simplicity.

Good Idea, Disappointing Presentation
Eliot Weinberger's "19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei" (subtitled "How a Chinese Poem is Translated") presents Wang Wei's famous "Deer Park" poem in 19 versions: Chinese, transliterated Chinese (Pinyin), and a word-by-word rendering, then in 16 (or so) translations with Weinberger's comments.(The translations are primarily into English, although a Spanish version and two French versions are also included.)

From the title, which appears to be inspired by Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," I expected something a little more contemplative.I found Weinberger's comments, on the whole, to be unnecessarily vicious and judgmental.It's as if every section of Stevens's poem ended with the line "But this way of looking at a blackbird is wrong."Weinberger never does offer a translation of his own, although he appears to have some kind of ideal in mind of which every translation he profiles somehow falls short.

This would not in itself be a bad thing--for we must recognize that every translation does, in some way, depart from the original.But Weinberger seems to feel that any change to the poem, especially any expansion, is due to the translator's special hatred for the poet and contempt for his readers' intelligence.In section 8 he states that additions to a translation are "the product of a translator's unspoken contempt for the foreign poet" (p. 17).He goes on to suggest that the translators of the version on which he is commenting were too dense to realize that Wang Wei could have written X (as in the translation) but chose to write Y.While I think his point is well-taken, it could easily have been made without the caustic innuendo.Reading some of the translations, you do wonder what these guys were thinking--but I don't believe that assuming they're stupid oafs at best or malicious tinkerers at worst is really the right way to approach things.

I found the brief essays by Octavio Paz to be more what I expected: commentary on the poem itself, as well as a balanced and interesting exploration of the issues involved in translating it.He explains calmly why he made the choices he did in his Spanish version (also present in the book), and why he made certain (and significant) changes from his original draft.

While it is interesting and perhaps even enlightening to have such a varied collection of translations side-by-side, any real insights into what the comparison says about "How a Chinese Poem is Translated" will have to be deduced by the reader alone, as Weinberger's jeering comments are rarely much help in this direction.The concept is a solid one, but I wish the presentation were a little more balanced.

(Note: for a more recent consideration of the poem, see J.P. Seaton's analysis of the role of written characters in the poem's meaning, "Once More, on the Empty Mountain," in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, ed. Frank Stewart.)

making the impossible seem easy
Any attempt to translate poetry from one language to another is fraught with difficulty, and that is increased many times when the languages and non-comensurate ones like Chinese and American.This little book does not take long to read, but deserves close study in order to tease out how different (western) minds have attempted to put Chinese into American.This book shoud be in the library of anyone interested in poetry in general and Chinese poetry in particular.

Amazing wee book
I checked the book out of the local library a couple of weeks ago and have not stopped reading it since.The library volume is due back, so I just purchased it.My only complaint is that the last poem is Gary Synder's from 1978.I would like to see Mr Weinberger reissue the volume with latter translations such as Arthur Sze or Sam Hamill.And if any one is looking for a most needed project, a translation of all of Wang Wei's Wang River poems. ... Read more

Product Description
Karmic Traces contains essays as entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poetry, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe. For the past twenty years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay far beyond the borders of literary criticism or personal journalism and into the realm of poetry and narrative. Full of stories, yet written in a condensed, imagistic language, his essays are works of the imagination where all the facts are verifiable. As entertaining as fiction and as vivid as poems, making unexpected stops in odd corners of the globe or forgotten moments in human history, erudite, politically engaged, and acerbically witty, there is nothing quite like his work in contemporary writing. In Karmic Traces, Weinberger's third collection from New Directions, twenty-four essays take the reader along on the author's personal travels from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong on the verge of the handover to China, as well as on imagined voyages in a 17th-century Danish ship bound for India and among strange religious cults or even stranger small animals. One never knows what will appear next: Viking dreams, Aztec rituals, Hindu memory, laughing fish, or prophetic dogs. And, in "The Falls," the long tour-de-force that closes the book, Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history in a cascade of telling facts to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A fascinating collection of essays
Karmic Traces is a fascinating collection of essays featuring twenty-four of Eliot Weinbergers writings taking the reader along his personal travels ranging from the Atacama Desert to Iceland to Hong Kong. Here are also to be found imagined voyages among strange religious cultures and even stranger animals. The capping work is "The Falls", wherein Weinberger recapitulates 3,000 years of history to uncover the deep roots of contemporary racism and violence. Karmic Traces is a highly recommended body of writing that is as vivid as poetry, as entertaining as fiction, and as informative as any travelogue of mind and body.

Kafka, Vikings, & MTV: The Merging Point of Criticism & Art
Aestheticians have, I think, long wrestled with the question of whether art's value lies in its spontaneity or its control.The spontaneous, like a volcano, will cover more intellectual ground, whereas the controlled, a sort of rose in the irion filings, gives us the precision of high aesthetic achievement.Here in Weinberger's book of essays, as much art as about art (or politics, culture, history, Iceland, and more), we experience the breadth & expanse of imaginative knowledge plus the exact control of fine writing & a clear mind; with Weinberger the volcano IS the rose in the iron filings. Nothing like essays anyone has ever written for school, nor like much of nonfiction available anywhere, these essays are moving in all senses of the word: they move from topic to topic, moving us as well.Weinberger, whose sense of language has come from years of translating Spanish and, recently, Chinese, is one of today's few intellectuals not affiliated with any university.He is thus as rare as an intellectual in medieval Europe unconnected to the Church; Karmic Traces, colossal & microscopic at once, is likewise as unique a find. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The First Review!?!
Eliot Weinberger is hands-down the finest American essayist around.Read this book as a primer. ... Read more

Product Description
New York artist Vija Celmins has made many images of the night sky--paintings, drawings, and prints of gorgeous richness. In The Stars she and her collaborator, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, devote an artist's book to the theme. Celmins created three celestial prints for the project, which she also designed. One print, inspired by the worn binding of an early 20th-century Japanese book, becomes the volume's mottled deep-blue cover; the second and third prints are images of the night sky, one of them negative--dark stars on a pale ground. For the text, Weinberger assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources. This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, the text supplements Celmins's images visually as well as verbally. The Stars was originally a limited-edition livre d'artiste published this year by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art.Paperback, 7.25 x 11 in./48 pgs / 3 color. ... Read more

Product Description
In a new cycle of linked nonfiction prose-pieces, Eliot Weinberger creates another "vortex for the entire universe." (Boston Review)

If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming.
If the jaguar bites you, they are not people.
—Eliot Weinberger, from "Lacandons"

Internationally acclaimed as one of the most innovative writers today, Eliot Weinberger has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narrative where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable. With An Elemental Thing, Weinberger turns from his celebrated political chronicles to the timelessness of the subjects of his literary essays. With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq border and the Kaluli in the mountains of New Guinea. Among the thirty-five essays included are a poetic biography of the prophet Muhammad, which was praised by the London Times for its "great beauty and grace," and "The Stars," a reverie on what's up there that has already been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and Maori. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Borges in watercolor
I imagine this collection as a watercolor painted by Borges - little surprise considering that the essays are largely dealing with Chinese themes and that the author translated Borges into English.
An Elemental Thing is the perfect title for the book. It breaks apart the common reality into separate pieces, which contain no plot but beauty that, in a sense, surpasses any plot, because the universe doesn't have one. So don't air, sunset and love. They simply are.
In our world of commercialized and predictable clones, this book is a unique creation.

Hope
I imagine it must be awfully frustrating to have written so many interesting pieces and to have so little response. The world is drowning in utterly predictable writing. Eliot Weinberger's essays are more in tune with what the word "essay" once was: attempts, explorations, something more tentative but justified by rich interest and a genuine wish to understand. The millions of essays written every day now: the "news' for example, really don't provide any nourishment for the soul, which is what literature started as. Now it's mostly pretend.

People who already know all about everything will find little satisfaction in Eliot Weinberger, but if you are not so sure and still have some innate hopefulness about the possibility that the universe is intentional, I think you will really be glad he took all the trouble he undoubtedly took to write all these curious, poetic essays.

Floored me
This is possibly the most amazing writing I have ever read.Each essay is beautiful and brilliant on it's own, but once I got to the fifth or so essay I could feel a very subtle big picture being painted, and that was the real knock-out.It would be too much to say what all of these together say or mean, but there is beautiful underlying cohesion.
I can't find the exact quote, but one reviewer said something like, "Eliot Weinberger seems to have personally seen or read about every event in history."Indeed.

Wow!
There are some music albums that make you listen to music differently than you ever had before.

'An Elemental Thing' has forced me to read differently.It's not an ungainly monster like Proust or an unreadable trainwreck like Naked Lunch.Nonetheless, it has taken my thinking and my own internal narrative (at least for the duration of my reading) into weird sideways hallways and inexplicable culs-de-sac of color, texture, and meaning.You will learn why tigers have become endangered while at the same time not really knowing if you can trust what you've learned.A history of Chinese discoveries is shortly followed by a short history of the Peruvian desert peoples and their penchant for heterosexual sodomy.

Reading this book is like drinking cold, clear, water.

... Read more

Product Description
from "Mutra" (1952) to recent Sanskrit adaptations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Poetic Ambassador
A Tale of Two Gardens is a collection of poems dealing with Nobel laureate Octavio Paz relationship with the great nation of India.He made many trips there over the years.Paz was also the Mexican ambassador to India. (He resigned the position in 1968 to protest government assault onprotesters.)There were still later sojourns to India afterwards.Mutrais a really strong poem.It is a flower that grows with each subsequentreading.Few cities have ever been so aptly honoured.Another of thepoems I like is The Balcony.Wind From All Compass Points is anotherstandout.The whole collection is a grand achievement.India is the mostenduring civilization on the planet.It is only fitting that one of themost enduring poets of the twentieth century should write a poetic tribute. These poems were written over a period of forty years.The love andpassion Paz feels for Indian culture and peoples is recurrent in thesepoems.This was truly his second home.It was the second garden so tospeak.And from this love of India came a great gift of poetry for therest of the world to read and know.

Sensual and evocative
Once again Octavio Paz expresses his love and passion for India and things Indian but this time through his poetry. They style is fluid, sensual and evocative, add to it a plethora of colorful imageries. ... Read more

Product Description
A selection from the lifework of the internationally renowned poet Bei Dao, who is “like reading Chekhov or Turgenev reflected in a porcelain bowl” (The Times [London]).in the mirror there is always this moment
this moment leads to the door of rebirth
the door opens to the sea
the rose of time
             —Bei Dao

The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China’s most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao’s entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages. ... Read more

Product Description
New poetry by the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile.Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who invented a new poetry and a new language in the attempt to speak of the enormity of their times. The sixth book of Bei Dao's work published by New Directions, Unlock has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, the distinguished essayist and critically acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and the poet himself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile
the book, also, never mentions barbed wire but makes barbed wire come to mind.Bei Dao's writing is some of the most pressing, urgent poetry I have ever read.The man is a great poetic genius.With lines about such things as the wind closing its iron fist, Bei Dao speaks with power & elegance against repression & of the absolute importance of the individual.This book is very important.Bei Dao has made himself a significant man.Context of human value.According to Jonathan Spence from the New York Times Book Review, Bei Dao "was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.'"According to highly respected poet Robert Hass, "[A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame."Something else that's nice about this book is that it's bilingual, & Bei Dao was active in the translation process.

The Poetry of Exile
This is a wonderful collection of Bei Dao's most recent works. What I love most about his poetry is the way it grapples with language in a way that is not quite surreal but not concrete either. Many of the poems are self reflective in that they ponder what it means to be a poet writing and thinking in a language that is not the same as the places of his "exile" (Western Europe and the United States). Although, in my opinion, the book of poetry prior to this collection, called Old Snow, is an even stronger statement on these issues. You can tell from the poetry that the current political situation of China, and an alienation are still fresh in Bei Dao's mind (I have talked briefly with Bei Dao about some of these issues). I have no doubt that he will find a place as one of the great poets of the modern age. ... Read more

Product Description
"American Poetry Since 1950" is a new map of the territory, an array of known and unknown contemporary classics. It is full of strange texts and startling procedures, histories and natural histories, high lyricism and extended meditations-- extraordinary works that challenge our notions of what a poem ought to be.

Since Whitman and Dickinson, most of the major poetry in the United States has been written against the literary establishments and prevailing canons of taste, and often far from the cultural centers. This is the first anthology in many years to gather the work from this continuing tradition of innovators and outsiders, presenting poets and poems that are still excluded from the academic collections.

Opening with the last poems of the Modernist masters Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H.D., the book follows through four generations of writers who have been the primary figures of the new poetries and poetics since 1950. With a historical afterword, complete bibliographies, and generous selections from each of the thirty-five poets, this anthology is the only available introduction to the poets connected with such groups and movements as the Objectivists, the Beats, Black Mountain, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and ethnopoetics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A fresh look at what we thought we knew
There are not many anthologies of which you can say they are needed, but this is may be one of them. Eliot Weinberger, best known as a translator of Latin American poetry (especially that of Octavio Paz), has done an admirable job here of articulating how innovation in American poetry was taking place from the 1950s through the 1970s and even into the 1990s. The volume's subtitle, "Innovators and Outsiders," can be misleading, as many of the thirty-five poets included here are now among the most familiar to contemporary readers, few of whom would consider the likes of Williams, Pound, H.D., Creeley, Ginsberg, etc. "outsiders." Yet, all of these poets were or are innovators. Weinberger has put together a fascinating "narrative" and a refreshing, personal rereading of poetry in the U.S. from around 1950 on. (You can quibble all you want with the selection, and some readers, myself included, will find some of the poetry here just awful, but Weinberger's justification for this volume in the brief introductory note is outstanding.) Just as importantly, his brief essay following the selections, "American Poetry Since 1950: A Very Brief History" is offers an excellent and insightful overview of how major creative tendencies have followed one after another in the past fifty years.

Excellent Book
This is an excellent cross-section of late twentieth century poetry....of course it leaves some favorites out and includes poets I am not particularly enamored with but ultimately I have used this book a greatdeal.....highly recommended...I am especially pleased with the inclusion ofRonald Johnson......very interesting work.... ... Read more

Product Description
“Rexroth’s readings from the Japanese master poets are breathtaking in their simplicity and clarity.”—The New York Times

I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.
—Izumi Shikobu

Over the years, thousands of readers have discovered the beauty of classic Japanese poetry through the superb English versions by the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth. Mostly haiku, these poems range from the classical and medieval to modern poetry, with an emphasis on folk songs and love lyrics. Because women played such an outstanding role in Japanese literature, included here are selections from their work, including the contemporary, deeply sensuous Marichiko. This elegant, beautifully designed gift book of poems spanning many centuries presents the original texts in romanji, the transliteration into the Western alphabet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Whenever the Wind Blows..."
This was meant to be a Valentine's Day present, but I kind of stole it. Kenneth Rexroth does a wonderful job in this translation and selection of these very old Japanese poems. They are mostly written in the traditional tanka or haiku. The blunt simplicity of the words gives me chills and show the timeless quality of how you can say so much with so little. This collection of poetry reminds me that language is a gift. ... Read more

Product Description
Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In "The Total Library", more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume - all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been published in English. "The Total Library" presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and as the inventor of a universe that is an indispensible guide to Borges. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful collection of Borges' non-fiction
This is a wonderful collection of Borges' non-fiction.It is a marvelous book to read and ponder.The only thing I could have wished for is a larger print font.I find I have to read this one with a magnifying glass.I suppose I shouldn't complain because there is SO much material.I will give this 5 stars just for the wealth of good reading it has to offer. ... Read more

Product Description
“Nothing stands still in this poetry: the wind blows the trees, the lake water ripples and the ever-present road runs in and out of the hills.”—American Poetry Review

Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.
—Ch’ien Ch’i

This exquisite gift book offers a wide sampling of Chinese verse, from the first century to our own time, beginning with the lyric poetry of Tu Fu, moving to the folk songs of the Six Dynasties Period, on to the Sung Dynasty, and to the present. Also represented are some of the best-known women of Chinese poetry, including Li Ching-chao and Chu Shu-chen. These simple, accessible but profound poems come through to us with a breathtaking immediacy in Kenneth Rexroth’s English versions—a wonderful gift for any lover of poetry.
... Read more

Product Description
Presented at the PEN World Voices Festival as a “post-national” writer,Eliot Weinberger is “a sparkling essayist” (Confrontation), andhis writings “a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting cabinet ofcuriosities” (The Bloomsbury Review).Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.

One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.

The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war. ... Read more

Product Description

In Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

Customer Reviews (1)

Human Documents: Eight Photographers (Peabody Museum)
In //Human Documents//, the selected images of eight photographers--Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Adelaide de Menil, Kevin Bubriski, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb--are all presented. The works of these photographers were realized over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard University. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls "human documents"--a visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity.

You can say that there is really nothing new in this book except that it presents the individual visions of the photographers and it refines the view from which we look at them. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, Ethiopia, and the United States, //Human Documents// demonstrates the important role photography can play in still furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay "Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet)," in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

Reviewed by Dominique James ... Read more

Product Description
Essayist Eliot Weinberger sets his sights on the Bush team with brilliant, thought-provoking, funny consequences.

Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot Weinberger's chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 200l—and an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraq—and picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan, where Weinberger lives, on the "day after." With wit and anger, and sometimes startling prescience, What Happened Here takes us through the first term of the "Bush junta": the deep history of the neoconservative "sleeper cell," the invention of the War on Terror, the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the often bizarre behavior of the Republican Party. For twenty-five years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay form into unexplored territory. In What Happened Here, truth proves stranger than poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Emotional and Gut Wrenching
As the publisher of The Iraq War Blog, An Iraqi Family's Inside View of the First Year of the Occupation, I was absolutely amazed at the accuracy of Mr. Weinberger's perceptions of the Bush administration, it's cabal of evildoers, and the true conditions surrounding the war in Iraq. I am currently working on a book on the Bush administration and in the past three years, I have read nearly 200 books, and countless magazine articles and stories, and I must say, with all due apologies to other authors, that What Happened Here is the best book I have read in this genre. The simplicity and emotion with which Mr. Weinberger has detailed his observations are what make this book what it is: a great piece of literature that must be read by everyone, everywhere.

good on iraq bad on sontag
I read Weinbeger on Sontag and found his review of her work -- irritating and actually quite bitchy. I'm not some great fan of hers -- but just found his NYR overview of her oeuvre a most appalling example of self referential bitchiness masking as brilliant insider insight. I googled him and found out that -- surprise -- he wrote that very elegant essay against the US invasion of Iraq. So I ponder how to square the two Elitots.... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Exquisite Poetry in English y Espagnol
This bilingual text enhances the experience of reading Paz's poetry.His poetic form can be as spare and suggestive as tanka/haiku or dense with visual imagery as in the poem, A Fable of Joan Miro.The meditative tone of many selections suggests that beyond the accomplishments of art, literature and music, the essential composition is of oneself: "to learn to see so that things will see us and come and go through our seeing." Highly recommended.

A stunning achievement by a giant of 20th century poetry
Octavio Paz wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 20th century. The collection of poems entitled "A Tree Within" represents one of his most memorable achievements. A remarkable diverse blend of short lyrics and longer, Whitmanesque creations, "A Tree Within" is definitely a collection that bears careful reading and re-reading.

The book is richly studded with multicultural references and allusions--to Epictetus, Buddha, Gilgamesh, Jack the Ripper, the Aztecs, Don Quixote, and many, many, more. But Paz is not merely trying to dazzle us with his knowledge. He is also introspective and revealing. He struggles with deep questions about language, love, and other concerns.

Paz seems to be searching both for an ideal poetic language, and for a form of connectedness that transcends language--a paradoxical quest, yet pure Paz. When he writes "Man's word / is the daughter of death" (in the poem "To Talk"), it strikes me as both a tragically naked confession of inadequacy and a moment of serene liberation. At other times, Paz seems, like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, to be groping towards the creation of a sort of "secular scripture" for the (post)modern age.

In the poem "I Speak of the City," Paz writes, "I speak of our public history, and of our secret history, yours and mine." The histories recorded by this visionary genius are certainly some of the most important literary creations of the 20th century. ... Read more

Product Description
A celebration of contemporary poetry from around the world, World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions is a treasure trove that will satisfy and fascinate poetry lovers.

A mosaic of twenty-eight foreign and American poets, World Beat is an extraordinary compilation, unlike any other anthology, of the poetry being written today. For some seventy years, New Directions Publishing has brought literary America the world, introducing many of the world's most important, and at the time usually unknown, writers. Today, with a diminishing earth and an increasingly isolated United States, dialogue among the nations is desperately needed. On the poetic front, this dialogue assumes a particular potency and urgency. In World Beat, expertly edited by the remarkable writer and translator Eliot Weinberger, a new generation of New Directions poets from across the globe mingles in a euphonic cross-cultural chorus.

The collection opens with the last poem by Octavio Paz, a major work previously unpublished in book form, and then tracks through the writings of foreign and American poets that New Directions has published in recent years. From the haunting erotic lyrics of the young Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku, to the powerful political insights of exiled Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, and Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, to the lapidary beauty of Dutch poet Hans Faverey and the wild experiments of Chinese poet Gu Cheng and Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi, to Nobel Prize shortlisters Bei Dao of China, Inger Christensen of Denmark, Gennady Aygi of Chuvashia, and Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden—here is a planetary greatest hits that also includes work by Canadian Anne Carson and a range of American poets (Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Robert Creeley among them), whose works take on new resonances when read alongside their world-peers. ... Read more