ANNOTATED BOOKS RECEIVED TABLE OF CONTENTS Philosophy and Religion....................................................44 Literary Works Reference............................................................................46 Anthologies..........................................................................1 Reprints ..............................................................................47 Reprints ................................................................................4 Social Sciences...................................................................48 Arabic...................................................................................7 Translation Studies.............................................................48 Catalan. ................................................................................7 Index of Translators ..........................................................51 Chinese.................................................................................7 Directory of Publishers ......................................................55 Croatian................................................................................8 Czech....................................................................................8 LITERARY WORKS Dutch....................................................................................8 ANTHOLOGIES Estonian................................................................................9 Finnish..................................................................................9 (French) All Gall: Malicious Monologues & Ruthless French...................................................................................9 Recitations. Selected and adapted by Norman R. Shapiro. New German...............................................................................13 York and London. Applause Books. 2000. 223 pp. Paper: Greek..................................................................................16 $15.95; ISBN 1-55783-391-5. This collection is aimed at two Hebrew...............................................................................17 audiences: those who will relish its literary interest (spanning a Hungarian...........................................................................17 variety of authors, styles, and tones) and theatrical folk who are Icelandic.............................................................................18 always on the lookout for unusual audition material. The monologues are bone fide examples of the once popular genre Italian..................................................................................18 that flourished in France around the turn of the century as Japanese .............................................................................21 practiced by the likes of Georges Feydeau, Fernand Raynaud, Latin ...................................................................................22 et al. There are also works intended for the printed page, Norwegian..........................................................................22 whether brief journalistic vignettes of Alphonse Allais, modern Occitan ...............................................................................23 prose poems of Jacques Sternberg, or the fictions of Polish..................................................................................23 Apollinaire and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Shapiro states, "The Portuguese..........................................................................24 French have long loved what, for better or worse, has come to Quechua .............................................................................24 be known as humour noir, 'black humor.' The several dozen Romanian. ..........................................................................24 works in this collection will, I hope . help to show why. Russian...............................................................................24 Perhaps they will also make a few converts to Gallic (and gall- Serbo-Croatian ...................................................................26 ic) wit among my otherly-humored Anglo-American readers." Spanish...............................................................................27 Applause has published a number of Shapiro's translations of plays by Feydeau, Eugene Labiche, and Ludovic Halévy in a Swedish ..............................................................................30 series entitled "A New Series of Farce Through the Ages." Tamil ..................................................................................31 Ukrainian............................................................................31 (Various) Christmas in Scandinavia. Ed. Sven H. Rossel and Urdu ...................................................................................31 Bo Elbrønd-Bek. Tr. David W. Colbert. Lincoln. University of Vietnamese.........................................................................31 Nebraska Press. 1999. 199 pp. Paper: $12.00; ISBN 0-8032- Welsh .................................................................................32 8980-4. This collection of 17 tales by 19th- and 20th-century Yiddish...............................................................................32 writers from the five Nordic countries contains, among others, the Christmas story by Hans Christian Andersen called "The Non-Fiction Fir Tree" and stories by Nobel laureates Selma Lagerlöf and Art and Architecture. .........................................................32 Johannes V. Jensen. Most of these pieces have never been Autobiography, Letters, Memoirs, Interviews. .................33 available in English before. In his Introduction, Sven H. Rossel Biography...........................................................................35 discusses the rich and fascinating Scandinavian Christmas Cultural Studies..................................................................37 traditions, the origins of this feast, and its celebration in contemporary Scandinavia. Bo Elbrønd-Bek interprets a History and Politics............................................................38 number of selected stories in relation to the central Christmas Literary Theory and Criticism. ..........................................41 message. Translator David W. Colbert is the author of The Natural History and Science..............................................44 Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre. Translation Review - Annotated Books Received - Vol. 6, No. 1 - July 2000 1 (Greek) Dances for Flute and Thunder: Praises, Prayers, and Paper: $19.95; ISBN 1-8101-1374-0. European Drama Insults. Poems from the Ancient Greek. Tr. Brooks Haxton. New Classics. Timothy Langen and Justin Weir present the first York. Viking. 1999. 84 pp. Cloth: $20.00; ISBN 0-670-88728-5. collection of translated plays from 20th-century Russia. Brooks Haxton writes that these short poems "still offer, much as Contents include Holy Blood by Zinaida Gippius, The ever, human contact, beauty, and wisdom." But because they Unknown Woman by Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky have gone unread in recent times, Haxton has set out to remedy by Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Case of the Entry Room by this neglect with Dances for Flute and Thunder, a fresh and Victor Ardov, Squaring the Circle by Valentin Kataev, lyrical translation of poems spanning 13 centuries, from Sappho Elizaveta Bam by Daniil Kharms, Grain by Vladimir Kirshon, to Theokritos to the anonymous Greek poets of the Roman and The Guests by Leonid Zorin. These plays reflect the varied Empires. With his ear for the vitality of these poetic voices, cultural and political history of Russia from pre-revolutionary Haxton holds a mirror up to us across three milennia, proving times to the end of Stalinism. All eight translations are new, that our concerns are much the same as those that haunted the and four appear here for the first time in English. Langen and ancients. Poems range from love notes to curses to boasts of Weir also provide an insightful introduction to the literary and battle. Although Haxton never studied ancient Greek, he used political contexts in which the plays first appeared, considering lexicons and inflection charts to try to deliver as much as the influence that various literary movements had on the possible of the old poems into English. "What I did to bring the development of Russian drama and exploring the effect of the poem alive in English serves poetry, I hope, if not scholarship. In increasingly politicized climate of the new Soviet state. all such judgments, I considered loss of intensity, in my version of an effective poem, a crucial loss of accuracy." (German) German Poetry in Transition 1945-1990. Ed. and tr. Charlotte Melin. Hanover, NH. University Press of New (Various) Dreaming the Actual: Contemporary Fiction and England. 1999. 381 pp. Cloth: $50.00; ISBN 0-87451-914-4. Poetry by Israeli Women Writers. Multiple translators. Ed., and Paper: $24.95; ISBN 0-87451-915-2. Bilingual. Offering new intro. Miriyam Glazer. Albany. State University of New York translations of poetry written in German between 1945 and Press. 2000. 384 pp. Cloth: $65.60; ISBN 0-7914-4557-7. Paper: 1990, this collection—the first to cover the entire period of the $21.95; ISBN 0-7914-4558-5. SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Cold War—includes poems by nearly 100 poets from Literature and Culture. Dreaming the Actual introduces the throughout the German-speaking