A selection of recent work as well as the best from thirteen volumes of poetry published across four decades, Change of Address highlights the magnitude and scope of David Slavitt's poetic achievement. Meditating on both the quotidian and the sublime and ranging from brilliant satire to tender elegy, this retrospective collection brings into sharp relief Slavitt's intelligence, strength of voice, and ease in varied poetic forms. From the beginning of his career, Slavitt has displayed a rare technical virtuosity, and his verse has long confronted -- with urbanity and poise -- questions of love, grief, loss, and death. Though he is an exuberantly playful poet, his gamesmanship is earnest, toying wisely and bravely with the largest experiences of joy and heartbreak. And his gestures, while seemingly effortless, are carefully considered. The result is a body of poetry that haunts us as only the best literature can. A splendid capstone to Slavitt's copious output, Change of Address grants readers access to the extraordinary spectrum of his poetry in a single volume. body betrays, and even a mind can rebel, but against what? What remains? Slowly but surely, we are forced to suppose a soul, which serves us well, while we serve it unfaithfully and impurely. Infinitely regressive? Or merely shy? Call it what watches, suffers, and remains our subject/object, despite whatever pains we may impose upon it, an inner I.Or is it a mere fiction that one may admit as useful or even necessary? Its truth is theoretical, a series, a trend, almost algebraic: and one conjures it from the motes that fly in the thin air of his youth to create the granite block that marks his end. -- "Soul
This elegant new translation at last restores the poetry to one of the greatest and most influential poems in the Western tradition. De Rerum Natura is Lucretius's majestic elaboration of Greek Epicurean physics and psychology in an epic that unfolds over the course of six books. This sumptuous account of a secular cosmos argues that the soul is mortal, that pleasure is the object of life, and that humanity has free will, among other ideas. Renowned author, translator, and poet David R. Slavitt has captured Lucretius's elegance as well as his philosophical profundity in this highly readable translation of a poem that is crucial to the history of ancient thought.
Falling from Silence is the seventy-third book by David Slavitt, the prolific poet, novelist, translator, and editor. His amazing rate of production has only amplified and refined the power of his art. This is the work of an accomplished veteran, a craftsman who laments the limitations of what his hard-earned talent can do in the face of age and loss. He turns to religion, reads the classics, and in moments of cheer that may not be mere mania, he horses around and fools with the words that have been his toys, but nothing helps—or, more accurately, nothing helps enough. It is nevertheless true that, as he says in “Pen,” The letters that danced in the light like gnats will suddenly light on some twig of a notion a held breath can make tremble in an unpredictable motion—like this pen’s— that no one would think could bear the fruit of truth. Ranging in tone from devilish and droll to dignified and desolate, the poems here examine death and aging and bespeak the reassuring connection between the generations. In “Angel of Death,” the speaker remarkably balances grief and joy in describing the birth of his grandson, who bears the name of the poet’s father: “I hold him in my arms, the precious, breathing / weight, and admire the tiny hands / that will bear the weight one day of my coffin’s corner. . . . / That a Sam once more will carry me is a comfort.” Slavitt’s wry wit, profound humanity, and agile intellect illuminate every page of Falling from Silence. In contrast to its title, it is, indeed, a resounding poetic triumph.
David R. Slavitt brings together eight poems that deal largely with the mind's relation to history--personal history, and the history of myth and of empires. In addressing these two seemingly independent modes of thinking and remembering, Slavitt reveals that they are in fact closely related, and that they are both part of our poetic consciousness.
A political neophyte challenges the status quo or How a Cranky Conservative Launched a Campaign and Found Himself the Liberal Candidate (and Still Lost)
Epic poem, biography, literary criticism, historical romance—in A Gift, David Slavitt presents the fascinating life of Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, one of history’s great unknowns, a man blessed and cursed by his conviction that within him lay the capacity for literary greatness. Educated in the church, the young da Ponte carouses in Venice, flees Italy, and finds himself in Austria, trying to establish a career in the theater. Under the tepid patronage of Joseph II of Austria, he turns out libretti for Salieri and learns the “whorey tricks” of writing on demand: “Adaptation, translation, theft.” In lines that ring harrowingly true, Slavitt reflects the young man’s self-doubts: The mad hope grows like a mold on bread that it’s not so bad, is better than you think— but what that means is only that your judgment is going too, you can’t tell good from bad, are a fraud, impostor Then, on the brink of despair, he encounters Mozart—boorish, preferring crude farce to literary grace. Still, the partnership thrives with The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte. But good luck is not to be trusted, and “misfortune is not reliable either.” Despite his brilliant gift, success eludes da Ponte. Ever gullible, ever generous, he is destined to accumulate others’ debts, to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, to be forgotten. Da Ponte lives out his life in the fledgling United States, plagued by sickness, debt, and the implacably looming specter of failure. Slavitt has created a lovely, heartening book, one that reminds us that untested faith is no faith at all. Alight with muted passion, A Gift chronicles a man’s refusal to despair despite the growing awareness that nothing awaits but poverty and ignominy—“that this ill-fitting garment is what the wardrobe holds.” Through Slavitt’s lively imagination, we feel reverence rather than pity for the dogged nobility of da Ponte’s struggle. Ultimately, Lorenzo da Ponte is a hero, his life a victory.
In his twelfth book of original verse David R. Slavitt leads us to a crossroads where terror, loneliness, and despair are transfigured by love and art. Much of the collection centers on the poet’s family history. In the title poem, Slavitt imagines the “dour landscape” of the Polish hamlet his grandparents left in search of a safer haven, at the same time that he reflects ruefully on the hazards of contemporary life in America: but what they abandoned is what I dream of now, asleep, while people who don’t even know my name monitor consoles that show what zones in my house have been violated—what doors or windows opened, or motion sensors tripped by the cat or some intruder. On the street, cars are stolen and stripped by desperate men, wild children . . . Who can say? In another poem, he recalls his mother and his discovery only after her death—her murder—that the name she had been given was not Adele but Ida. As a young woman she had chosen to call herself something “not too cute, but not too plain, not Ida.” And it is Adele he decides on for her grave marker, in deference to her whimsical and brave spirit. Not only family but also the worlds of art, music, and literature animate Slavitt’s verses—from a consideration of the modes of salvation suggested by El Grenco’s and Goy’s paintings of Saint Peter to a reflection upon our common response to a discordantly tuned instrument, from echoes of Paradise Lost to witty and deft variations on Catullus. Throughout this collection David Slavitt’s keen intelligence, wry humor, and deep compassion shine through. Crossroads allows us to observe a poet working at the peak of his powers.
An accomplished poet and a keen observer of the human condition, David Slavitt deploys both skills to create the whimsical, insightful, and witty poems of The Octaves. In these graceful but often blunt, slyly humorous eight-line poems, Slavitt notes the passing of decades and the loss that entails, the questions that arise when studying works from ancient Greece, and the paradoxes found in philosophy, art, and even the common cold.
In The Walls Of Thebes, David Slavitt veers away from the graceful exercises and witty performances that characterize much of his earlier poetry. the poems in this book--brilliant, explosive, painful, and chilling by turns--seem wrested from the gristle of life.
The appearance of David R. Slavitt's translation of Orlando Furioso ("Mad Orlando"), one of the great literary achievements of the Italian Renaissance, is a publishing event. With this lively new verse translation, Slavitt introduces readers to Ariosto's now neglected masterpiece - a poem whose impact on Western literature can scarcely be exaggerated. Slavitt's translation captures the energy, comedy, and great fun of Ariosto's Italian.
This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that indicates the poet has moved into a new and most exciting period. Originally published in 1969. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
John Smith is an imminent historian, secure in his well-paid position as an endowed professor at a major university. Any day he expects a favorable reply to his application for a residency at the Villa Sfrondata, a foundation-supported colony for artists and intellectuals on the banks of Italy’s Lake Como, where he hopes to finish work on a study of Mussolini John Smith—the other John Smith—is a bitter and failed novelist, an adjunct assistant professor of English at the same university. Suffering from writer’s block, ignored by his daughter, hounded by his former wife’s attorney for back alimony, and about to lose his job, his prospects could not be dimmer—that is, until the day the Villa Sfrondata’s invitation to the eminent historian is delivered to him by mistake. Before you know it, the down-and-out-how-can-things-get-worse-what-have-I-got-to-lose John Smith is in Italy, ensconced, imposter though he is, in a room at the centuries-old villa. But what had promised to be a blissful if ill-gotten idyll quickly sours. The villa is drafty and decaying, the staffs are surly and incompetent, and the other residents—among them a Nigerian economist, a Washington lawyer, a book designer, an art historian, and a feminist poet from California—are a motley and eccentric group whom Smith finds all but insufferable. He seizes every opportunity to deflate their overblown pretensions with a razor-sharp wit, which he possesses in astonishing abundance. At the same time, he must take care that some misstep does not reveal him as a fraud. His life is further complicated when one of the guest—the despised feminist poet—mysteriously disappears. After passing through what he calls “a cloudy afternoon of the soul,” including the very real fear that he will be implicated in the disappearance of the poet, Smith contrives in the end to amend his life and even to revive his all but abandoned literary career. This devastatingly satiric and funny book, David R. Slavitt’s fiftieth, is a complicated burlesque that turns out to be a moving story of human frailty and spiritual rebirth. It is a feat of literary legerdemain that will dazzle even admirers of Slavitt’s Turkish Delights, Lives of the Saints, Salazar Blinks, and The Hussar.
Praise for David R. Slavitt “Slavitt’s touch is light, and he writes beautifully.... His satire is sharp, and he can be wildly funny.”—New York Times Book Review “One of America’s most lucid and classical poets.... Slavitt’s attitude is, as one would expect of a Hebrew as well as Greco-Latin classicist, sharply questioning as well as tragic. He is a poet one reads to know more.”—Booklist “Slavitt is both smart and wise; he’s as well known for his translations of the writers of antiquity as he is for his original work, both poetry and prose.... With a rich sense of humor, a bit of attitude, and a fascination with details, even minutiae, Slavitt tries his hand at new and curious measures and forms as well as seemingly free-range meditations—or, one might say, meanderings.”—Library Journal The bravura of David R. Slavitt’s first book of poems, published more than fifty years ago, continues to reverberate through his newest collection in a voice matured and roughened by age. Civil Wars conjures the mutterings of old men: meditations—despondent yet playfully witty and bold—on the meaning of life and death, the reasoning for human action or inaction, and misremembered memories. Nothing proves too lofty or too trifling for the poet’s scrutiny. Slavitt’s attention roves from the carnage inflicted by the Achaeans at Troy, to the performances of Borrah Minevich and the Harmonica Rascals, from meditations on Spinoza to the baseball of the New York Yankees. He considers with deliberation all of these subjects and deems them necessary to help create a spiritual connection in our lives. Slavitt encourages contemplation of the world and writing rather than acceptance of the thoughts of the critic, who “comes, austere, a man of authority, / and offers to help” but only dilutes the power of a poem. In this collection, Slavitt also includes translations of Greek, Hebrew, Provençal, French, and Old English poems, including a little-known piece by the mathematician Pierre de Fermat and the Old English epic poem “The Battle of Maldon.”
As he enters his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David R. Slavitt remains a determined wildcatter who ranges as far as he thinks necessary to drill for meaning, wherever and however he can get it. In his new collection, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence. With Opus Posthumous and Other Poems—the title is a joke, as he remains very much alive—Slavitt presents an august work possessed of a richness toward which he has worked throughout his long life. By turns wry, erudite, and dyspeptic, this new volume offers ample rewards of his maturity.
In The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems, veteran poet David R. Slavitt touches on topics from the mundane to the mysterious with his signature wit and intelligence. In "Stupid," for instance, he transforms a simple head cold into an appreciation for the richness of consciousness, and in "Waking," the very effort of rising from bed becomes something like a miracle. Slavitt explores the range of the human condition with such ease and insight that readers cannot help but ponder what life is - and what it could be. What if - like the mythic sea creature in "The Dogfish" - humans could return to the womb when frightened? In the collection's title poem, Slavitt gives a voice to the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which claims, persuasively, to possess a value to humans that is seldom noticed or appreciated. Slavitt has a unique ability to examine an idea - be it virtue or vice, dark or blithe - and offer perspective and wisdom about the conundrums of our existence." --Book Jacket.
Equinox is a collection of twenty-five poems on various subjects. They are occasional, in that most of them are the result of specific moments of experience.
Directly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the wandering bards. Upon the foundation of technical mastery, he has begun to build an oeuvre, to assert himself, and, with insouciance and gaiety, to grow into his majority. Originally published in 1965. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David R. Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac—this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft. The title story (complete with footnotes á la The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) braids together the tidy conventions of fiction and the brutal reality of New York as a writing teacher ponders s student’s sexually explicit story that may—or may not—be autobiographical. In “The Impostor” a writer’s brother exploits the legerdemain of fiction in a series of ever-bolder impersonations. Several of the stories are presented by emotionally wounded narrators, disillusioned men looking for a hint of grace in a world where expectations are frequently doomed to disappointment. In such a world only one thing is certain we will hurt—and be hurt by—the ones we love. And in the vacuum left when traditions that might have been redemptive have lost their meaning, “punishment gets to be a habit, a way of life, or at least something to hold onto.” The stories pivot on nuance, on the half-realized insight, on “some perfectly innocent and insignificant insight, on “some perfectly innocent and insignificant gesture that turns round and grows into a medium-to-large awkwardness.” We find what the divorced father futilely awaiting his daughter’s visit in “Hurricane Charlie” calls “dabblers in distress”: lonely, decent people trying to discover where love—and life—went. In “Simple Justice” a man striving for some definitive family memory compares the process to archaeology: “The shards that remain are pathetically small and almost grudging.” Thus through the faltering memory of an elderly cousin in “conflations” a man becomes a kind of incarnation of his own father and for a moment finds himself at the “vanishing point” where a lost past meets an unknowable future; in “The long Island Train” a simple anecdote becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the most apparently transparent human intentions. Yet it is often these shard of tradition and memory that seem to hold our only promise of transcendence. The protagonist of “Grandfather,” for example, through his reluctant participation in his grandson’s bris, finds a moment of reconciliation with a past that has broken loose of its moorings. Even the most experimental of these pieces—“Instructions,” a list of admonitions ranging from the quotidian to the cosmic—shows a deep humanity and a maturity of vision that steers adeptly between humor and despair. These stories will linger in the reader’s memory long after the book is closed.
This unique translation of the Old Testament book, with reflections on Judaism’s mournful history, “not only allows but demands rereading” (Pleiades). Distinguished poet David R. Slavitt here provides a translation of and meditation upon the Book of Lamentations, the biblical account of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 B.C., on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av—Tish’a b’Av. (Six centuries later the Romans destroyed the second Temple on the same day.) Most of the Jewish population was deported to Babylon, and the ensuing period came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity. According to tradition, the Book of Lamentations was written in response to this political, social, and religious crisis. The five poems composing the book express Israel’s sorrow, brokenness, and bewilderment before God. Tish’a b’Av is the day on which observant Jews fast and pray. And mourn. As Slavitt observes in his meditation: “It is forbidden on Tish’a b’Av even to study the Torah, except for the Book of Job and the Book of Lamentations. This is the day on which we grieve for every terrible thing that happens in this world. It is the worst day of the year.” Slavitt’s meditation provides a context for reading the scriptural text. Cast in the same style as the Hebrew poetry, his meditation recounts how sorrow and catastrophe have characterized so much of the history of the Jewish people, from their enslavement in Egypt to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. Few translations of this remarkable book of the Bible attempt to reproduce in English, as Slavitt does here, the Hebrew acrostics. In the original, each verse begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequential order; Slavitt elegantly reproduces this effect using the first 22 letters of the English alphabet. More than a structural or mnemonic device, Slavitt argues, the acrostics are “a serious assertion that the language itself is speaking, that the speech is inspired, and that there is, beyond all the disaster and pain the book recounts, an intricacy and an orderly coherence.”
If a novel is a work of prose of some length, this is a novel–but different in that it is more like life, which has no plots and does not reward virtue or punish vice, and in which characters appear and then, if the author doesn’t kill them off, remain to the end. Life is messier than Tolstoy and Henry James were willing to admit. Here, in David R. Slavitt’s farrago, one thing leads to another but without discernible direction until, at the end, there is a kind of resolution, a vision, however unreliable and approximate, of what the life of the speaker has been. It is a deeply thoughtful book but also laugh-out-loud funny. Like life, if we’re lucky.
David R. Slavitt’s affectionate translations of epigrams by sixteenth-century Welsh academic John Owen transmute a careful selection of the writer’s work into a vision of life, and in so doing bring Owen into conversation with the present day. Pithy, quick, favoring balance and economy over elaboration of style, the epigram is difficult in any language; that Owen mastered it in a language other than his own attests to his immense talent. Owen’s small treasures go directly to the core: “At your coming into the world, you gave a cry / of protest: why then protest that you must die?” Duessa’s Version: A Dirge in Seven Canticles offers an irreverent and provocative recapitulation of The Faerie Queene, as told by Duessa, the mutable sorceress of Spenser’s epic poem. Slavitt invests her with an unforgettable voice—outraged, profane, wise, and wickedly funny—and an exasperated contempt for the hero, Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight. Duessa’s retelling of The Faerie Queene becomes the scaffolding upon which Slavitt hangs his reflections on twentieth-century civilization and culture that are indebted at once to intelligent observation, to Spenser, and to Borscht Belt comedy. Here are virtuoso performances by a poet with resources of wit and erudition that are nothing short of astonishing. These masterly translations are bound “to get him—or at least his ghost—invited back.”
Here, from the author of Alice at 80 and many other highly acclaimed books, is a small gem of a novel, an exquisitely crafted, finely honed work in the grand tradition of the middle European novel of the last century. Indeed, David R. Slavitt's The Hussar takes its inspiration from one such novel, A Man of Honor, by the German writer Theodore Fontane. Having read and been intrigued by a plot description of that work, Slavitt determined to attempt the story of A Man of Honor on his own and then to compare his version with Fontane's original. The result of this 'literary parlor game' is nothing less than a tour de force.
Part memoir and part moving meditation on the price of fame, Slavitt looks back to the world of 1950s Hollywood to write a chronicle of the costs of the modern celebrity culture.
Part historical novel, part critical history and biography, and part Dadaist pastiche, The Duke's man is ultimately an affectionate send-up of the excesses of genre fiction, using sections of Dumas' text as a springboard for Slavitt's own narrative arabesques."--Book cover
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