David Rosenberg

A Life in a Poem

Memoirs of a Rebellious Bible Translator

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In 1990, the international bestseller, The Book of J (1990), co-authored by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (Grove; Faber in the U.K.) was followed by several books of poetry and prose (A Poet's Bible is the first biblical translation to win a major literary award), and then, in 2013, A Life in a Poem began as a Guggenheim Fellowship project. Now, in this trailblazing narrative about where we are going as a species, Rosenberg shows us how he became a writer both ancient and contemporary. The crucial Jewish poet of his time, rooted in the Hebrew of the Bible and the existential sublime of the New York School, Rosenberg has been read so far, by Jews and non-Jews, mainly for his experimental vision. Donald Hall described him as "an ancient Hebrew biblical poet as if writing today in the rhythms of the United States". Among critics, Harold Bloom states that "the play of languages emerges in Rosenberg as it does not in King James," while Frank Kermode wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "he must somehow be modern as well as faithful to the past, reproducing an ancient, strange, uncanny vigor, bearing in mind American poetry's struggle with natural speech". More recently, Adam Kirsch writes that Rosenberg is "replacing the doubtful miracle of divine inspiration with the genuine miracle of poetic inspiration", and Oxford's John Barton describes his work in the New York Review of Books as "neither epic nor romance nor tragedy nor comedy yet all these at once". These words may now apply as well to Rosenberg's innovative new memoir, A Life in a Poem.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Shearsman Books
• Seitenzahl: 402
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Mai 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 24mm
• Gewicht: 650g
• ISBN-13: 9781848616646
• ISBN-10: 1848616643
• Artikelnr.: 56739830

Autorenporträt

The international bestseller,"The Book of J" (1990), coauthored by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (Grove; Faber in UK) was followed by several books of poetry and prose before "A Life in a Poem" became a Guggenheim Fellowship project in 2013. The borders between poetry and translation, poetry and prose, have been crossed and re-crossed in Rosenberg's work, going back to the early '70s, when "Paul Evans and I established Voiceprint ("An Ant's Forefoot/Eleventh Finger Edition"-the two mags we edited) at the University of Essex, where I was a grad student. Then, Lit/Writing teaching (at York University, Toronto; The New School, NYC; most recently Princeton) and editing-but mostly I remained a student of origins: of my family's escape before the Holocaust (the half that made it) and which shaped my desire to both measure civilization's shadow and to somehow escape the grandiosity in doing so (as my father did, establishing the short-lived American Popcorn Company-in Detroit, where I was born); of the culture that produced the first great modernists like Gertrude Stein, who turned history sideways, using it as a lens through which to register glints of the unconscious; of the American blues culture that produced Blind Willie McTell and the existential deadpan that still cracks the tightly-wound pottery of much current poetry; of the Everglades ecosystem, near my current home in Miami and where I became poet-in-residence at Fairchild Tropical Garden; and of the Hebraic culture that produced the great biblical writers in Jerusalem, where I once lived and worked. Like a Freudian, I've searched for the origin of the primary lost writer in myself by returning to those at the origin of Western history, while trying to stay anchored in the present scene of writing in my Adirondack chair."