New Programs and Residencies:
Clayton Eshleman Programs and Readings for 2011:

May 10: NYC, Americas Society, 65th and Park Ave., 7 PM, book launch for Eshleman’s cotranslation with A. James Arnold, of Aime Cesaire’s Solar Throat Slashed (Wesleyan University Press).

October 19: NYC, The Poetry Project, 7 PM, group reading with Brent Hayes Edwards, Anne Waldman, Jayne Cortez, Jerome Rothenberg, Thomas Glave, Heller Levinson, and Clayton Eshleman of Solar Throat Slashed.

October 20: Cesaire program at Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, with Clayton Eshleman. Time and location TBA.

November 2: Berkeley, UC-Berkeley, 4 PM, Wheeler Hall 3rd floor, with Donna Jones on translation.

November 3: Berkeley, UC-Berkeley, noon, program on Solar Throat Slashed by Clayton Eshleman, location to be announced.

November 3: St Mary’s College, 7 PM, program on Solar Throat Slashed by Clayton Eshleman,, location TBA.

November 7: San Francisco State University, program on Solar Throat Slashed by
Clayton Eshleman for Maxine Chernoff’s class, 7 PM, location TBA.

November 9: Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Eshleman will participate in a poetry festival, reading his own poetry, time and location TBA.

November 10: UC-Santa Barbara, Eshleman program on Solar Throat Slashed, time and location TBA.

November 13: Venice, California, Beyond Baroque, 4 PM, Eshleman program on Solar Throat Slashed.

November 14: Los Angles, Loyola-Marymount, program by Eshleman on his poetry and his cotranslation of Solar Throat Slashed, time and location TBA.

November 16: La Jolla, California, UCSD, Eshleman program on Solar Throat Slashed, time and location TBA.

Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition. Aimé Césaire

(Translated and Edited by A. James Arnold and Claytron Eshleman, Weslean UP, 2011)

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire's most explosive collection of poetry Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metpahoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and epxerience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite.

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora (ISBN: 978-0-8195-7070-3. 172 pages).

Endure Poems by Bei Dao

(Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein, Black Widow Press, 2011)

Zhao Zhenkai was born on August 2, 1949 in Beijing. His pseudonym Bei Dao literally means "North Island," and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet's provenance from Northern China as well as his typical solitude.Dao was one of the foremost poets of the Misty School, and his early poems were a source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He has been in exile from his native China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In 2006, Bei Dao was allowed to move back to China. Bei Dao is currently Professor of Humanities at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

“I grew up with Bei Dao's poetry. His words inspired, still inspire those who believe in truth and beauty. A timely new translation by master translator Clayton Eshleman in collaboration with Lucas Klein, Endure is a treasure for the poetry of the world.”—Wang Ping

(ISBN: 978-0-9842640-8-7 175 pages).

Curdled Skulls Poems by Bernard Bador

(Translated by the author with Clayton Eshleman, Black Widow Press, 2011)

A comprehensive introduction to the poetry of the elusive and somewhat mysterious collage artist and poet Bernard Bador. Born in France, Bador has studied, lived, and exhibited his art on fice continents. After extended stays in the Far East and Los Angeles, he recently returned to France to reside and work in an old winemaking building in Beaujolais.

“Bernard Bador's poetry to date is surely one of the most unique bodies of work to have been influenced by a range of French poetry that begins with Lautremont, passes through Tzara and the various Surrealists strategies of the 20s and 30s, and, for Bador, culminates in the poetry of St. John Perse. While Bador acknowledges Perse as his most prominent predecessor, in the poetry of the latter it is as if Perse's galleons of light and renewal are suddenly sucked down into the still, vlack sheen of a petrified whilpool. Bernard Bador's poetry evokes faceless lakes of stillbeing, grids of flashing lesions, and a garroted apocalypse resplendent with repugnant urges. There is an appetite for slivers here, a special morbidity that recalls the sensibilities of the German poets Georg Trakl and Gottfired Benn. Anticipation of natural event in Bador is always rudely detoured, but at the point that conflicting images start to melt into senselessness, meaning again raises its head, even if wearing its own brain like a perverse tiara.”— Clayton Eshleman

(ISBN: 978-0-9842640-9-4 145 pages)

Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader. (November, 2008)

A comprehensive survey of Eshleman’s poetry, prose poems, essays, and translations. This one volume edition of Eshleman’s works spans some forty years of exploration and writing on themes as varied as ancient cave paintings and the Paleolithic imagination to critical self-analysis, to viewing modern politics through a poet’s eye. Eshleman and his poetry have remained vibrant and varied throughout his long career. A translator of the first rank, winner of a National Book Award and now two Landon Translation Awards (2008 award winner), Grindstone also allows a reader to see and participate in the breadth of Eshleman’s mastery of translation with examples from his works from the French of Aime Cesaire, Michel Deguy, Artaud, and from the Spanish of Cesar Vallejo and Neruda. With over 30 books to date there was a wealth of materials to choose from. This volume brings a succinct, thought out overview of a writer who has remained outside literary schools and any form of PC thought. A book that will engage, challenge and inspire those who pick it up. (ISBN: 978-0-9795137-7-0. 530 pages. $29.95)

In Praise of The Complete Poetry, César Vallejo, translated and edited by Clayton Eshleman

"An astonishing accomplishment. Eshleman's translation is writhing with energy."--Forrest Gander

"This is a crucially important translation of one of the poetic geniuses of the twentieth century."--William Rowe, author of Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life.

"Only the dauntless perseverance and the love with which the translator has dedicated so many years of his life to this task can explain why the English version conveys, in all its boldness and vigor, the unmistakable voice of César Vallejo."--from the Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa

This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939).

Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision--perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature--in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work.

The cover of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, A Bilingual Edition. Berkley: California UP, 2006. ISBN: 0520245520

University of California Press web site for The Complete Poetry.

Amazon.com web site for The Complete Poetry.