The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten

Front Cover
Norman Jope, Paul Scott Derrick, Catherine E. Byfield
Salt Publishing, 2011 - Literary Criticism - 443 pages
This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the Salt Selected Writings series, guides readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years – not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival – and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's oeuvre responds enables him to put down ‘multiple roots’ in a number of literary traditions, and this is reflected in the book’s diversity. It sets out not only to be of use to readers and scholars already acquainted with Berengarten’s poetry, but as a guide to those who are encountering his work for the first time. It is divided into three main sections, the first of which approaches the work thematically and the second chronologically, while the third focuses on his ‘Balkan trilogy’ (The Blue Butterfly, In A Time Of Drought and Under Balkan Light). The book also contains an appendix of essays on Berengarten's ancillary roles as literary activist, EFL teacher/entrepreneur and teacher of poetry to children, as well as a detailed bibliography.

About the author (2011)

PAUL SCOTT DERRICK is a Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Valencia. His main fields of interest are Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in subsequent American literature and art. He has published two collections of essays in English and has co-authored a number of bilingual, critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Henry Adams. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi, 2007). His most recent book-length publication is La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos (Biblioteca Javier Coy, 2008), a translation and critical study of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. He has published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Luis Cernuda and Pablo Neruda and, with Miguel Teruel, co-translations of Richard Berengarten's poems into Spanish (Las manos y la luz, Valencia, 2008). Born in Ohio, USA, CATHERINE E. BYFIELD has spent the majority of her life in the UK. She read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge; publications include a study of the Pedeir Keinc y Mobinogi, and Welsh translations of the Ioca Monachorum (co-authored with Martha J. Bayless). She is currently preparing studies of four Middle Welsh texts, and is also working on her first novel. She works as an administrator for graduate studies in the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

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