Through Naked Branches Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas

by Vesaas, Tarjei; Greenwald, Roger

• ISBN13: 9780999580349
• ISBN10: 0999580345
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-07-15
• Publisher: Black Widow Pr

Summary

Tarjei Vesaas's fame as one of Norway's and Scandinavia's greatest fiction

writers of the 20th century has often overshadowed his achievement as a

poet. This bilingual selection presents, in finely honed translations, fortysix

poems that reveal the distinctive sensibility and voice of Vesaas the

poet.

In a groundbreaking introductory essay, Roger Greenwald explores why

Vesaas's work has eluded many attempts at critical analysis and how it

challenges received notions of modernism. A collage of excerpts from

Vesaas's writings about himself and his work supplies helpful background

and gives some sense of the man behind the work. Vesaas emerges from

this volume as a lyric and meditative poet of uncommon depth, who renders

states of being beyond the reach not only of discourse, but of most poetry as

well.

Author Biography

Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970), the eldest son of a farming family in Telemark, Norway, is

among the giants of twentieth-century Scandinavian fiction. He won the Venice Prize in

1952 for a volume of stories, and the Nordic Council prize in 1963 for the novel Is-slottet

(The Ice Palace). His fiction has been widely translated. Starting in 1946, Vesaas

published five volumes of poetry during his lifetime; a sixth appeared posthumously in

1970. Many of his fiction titles are in print in English as his popularity remains strong.

Translator and Editor Roger Greenwald grew up in New York City, attended City College and the Poetry Project

workshop at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery, and then took graduate degrees at the

University of Toronto. He has published two books of poems, Connecting Flight

(Williams-Wallace) and Slow Mountain Train (Tiger Bark Press). His poems have

appeared in numerous journals (The World, Panjandrum, Poetry East, Pequod, The Spirit

That Moves Us, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, ELQ, etc.) and in several anthologies.

He has received major translation prizes in Canada and the U.S., including the

American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize (twice); the Lewis Galantière

Award from the American Translators Association; and the Harold Morton Landon

Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2015). His translations include North

in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen (University of Chicago Press) and

Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding (Black Widow Press).