Matokeo ya Utafutaji

Sappho's thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years--certainly a record for poetry of any kind--and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, her mystique end... More

The words of Jesus Christ are restored to their original poetic form ?in this extraordinary volume. Jesus Christ, whose teachings have been on the lips of millions for two millennia, is revealed here as one of the greatest poets of all time. What happened to deafen us to the poetic nature of his wor... More

Saint John's poetry of love and joy describes the soul's passage through dark night to final illumination in mystical union with Absolute Being. The allegory the poet uses is that of earthly love, and the poems are strikingly effective on the immediate level of personal experience, quite apart from ... More

“The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way . . . with evocative simplicity.” —Robert Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley The world’s greatest poetry resides in the Bible, yet these major poets are traditionally rende... More

A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet by the prize-winning poet and translator.Sappho’s lyric love poems, composed in the seventh century B.C.E., transcend time and place and continue to enchant readers today. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragme... More

The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marv... More

Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium CE--with earlier antecedents and later flourishings--whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Christian t... More

Mao Zedong, leader of the revolution and absolute chairman of the People's Republic of China, was also a calligrapher and a poet of extraordinary grace and eloquent simplicity. The poems in this beautiful edition (from the 1963 Beijing edition), translated and introduced by Willis Barnstone, are exp... More

Written during an astonishing outburst of creativity during a period of only two weeks in February 1922, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is one of the great poetic works of the twentieth century. Willis Barnstone brings these striking poems into English with an approach honed through years of work on ... More

A collection of interviews now available from New Directions for the first time The words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson)... More

Antonio Machado (1875-1939) is Spain's master poet, the explorer of dream and landscape, and of consciousness below language. Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado--like his contemporary Rilke--is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collecti... More

The translations take into account the final textual revisions by Jorge Luis Borges in his Obras completas, Emecé Editores, 1989. Any previous version of a poem published in English has been modified where necessary so that it conforms to the final state of the work as left by the author. <P><P>Th... More