Christopher Maurer Livres

A Pocket Mirror for Heroes is a mirror because it reflects "the person you are or the one you ought to be." It is a pocket mirror because its author took the time to be brief. And it is a mirror for heroes because it provides a vivid image of ethical and moral perfection to which all can aspire. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian was all but forgotten for three hundred years, until its republication in 1992 turned this lost classic into a New York Times bestseller. Now Gracian, the Spanish Jesuit considered Machiavelli's better in strategy and insight, sets a new standard on the art of living and the practice of achieving. That new standard is the art of heroism--how to be "the consummate person, ripe and perfect: accurate in judgment, mature in taste, attentive in listening, wise in sayings, shrewd in deeds, the center of all perfection." Gracian teaches the reader to be "a giant"--"the greatest person possible, a miracle of perfection, a king." Wit, wisdom, courage, elegance, grace, humility, spontaneity--these are the qualities needed to reach heroism in any occupation. But it is not enough to be wise or graceful: one must learn as well how to manage that talent, how to distinguish a quality fiom its shadow. A Pocket Mirror for Heroes provides "a politics for governing oneself, a compass for sailing toward excellence, an art for reaching distinction with just a few rules of discretion," and it will be wise and witty company for anyone who recognizes--and relishes--the challenges of daily life.

A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work And I who was walking with the earth at my waist, saw two snowy eagles and a naked girl. The one was the other and the girl was neither. -from "Qasida of the Dark Doves" Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading García Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who-as Maurer says in his illuminating introduction-"spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."

New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germ n Belli. This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germ n Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the "red midnight sun" of hope. Belli's contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its "azure cloister." Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli's original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This volume also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish in this bilingual edition.