Christopher Mattison

Christopher Mattison

Christopher Mattison

Christopher Mattison has been a part of the publishing and translation world since the mid-nineties. In his undergraduate career he studied Russian Language and Russian and East Eurasian Studies. He went on to earn his MA in Comparative Literature and his MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Mattison has translated and edited numerous works from Russian and Chinese to English. He was the editor for Bei Dao’s first two books of essays and has published two chapbooks of his own poetry. Mattison has worked as a senior editor at Zephyr Press and a Translation Editor for Zoland Poetry. In 2010 he moved to Hong Kong where he is the Director of the Sustainability of Memory and Artifacts (SOMA) Project at City University of Hong Kong.

cover image of the book Midnight’s Gate

Midnight’s Gate

Bei Dao has gained international acclaim for the hauntingly interior landscapes of his poetry, which has been translated and published in some twenty-five languages around the world. Now, in Midnight’s Gate, Bei Dao redefines the essay form with the same elliptical precision of his poetry, but with an openness and humor that complement the intensity of his poems. The twenty essays of Midnight’s Gate form a travelogue of a poet who has lived in seven countries since his exile from China in 1989. Like musical notes one the wind, the words carry us from a conflagration in New York, to the destruction in Palestine, to a prison in South Africa, to Norway, to Altea, to Inner Mongolia, to Death Valley, to a baseball game in Sacremento. At one point we are led into a basement in Paris where a production of Gorky’s Lower Depths unfolds for an audience of one, the next moment we are in the mountains of China were Bei Dao worked for eleven years as a concrete mixer and ironworker. In these essays, the subjective experience deepens and multiplies as the reader dives into the everyday lives of immigrants, artists, political figures, as well as a host of prominent writers. And it all coheres with a poet’s observations, meditations, and memories.

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cover image of the book Flowers of Evil: A Selection

Flowers of Evil: A Selection

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which in successive editions contained all of his published poems, has for over a hundred years now opened new vistas for man’s imagination and quickened the sensibilities of poets everywhere. The greatest French poet of the 19th century, Baudelaire was also the first truly modern poet, and his direct and indirect influence on the literature of our time has been immeasurable.

Here in this volume are selections from _Les _Fleurs du Mal as chosen by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews from their complete bilingual edition published by New Directions in 1955 — “undoubtedly the best single collection of Baudelaire’s verse in English” (St. Louis Post Dispatch).

Flowers of Evil: A Selection contains fifty-three poems which the Mathews feel best represent the total work and which have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gerard Le Dantec for the Pleiade edition are printed en face. Included are Baudelaire’s “Three Drafts of a Preface” and brief notes on the nineteen translators whose works is represented.

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