Funny Business
In Now We Are Sixty, English humorist Christopher Matthew (Diary of a Somebody) rewrites A.A. Milne's cherished childhood rhymes to describe middle-age spread, "Saloon Bar Romeos," inflation, pensions, tabloid scandals and cell phones: "They're changing sex at Buckingham Palace," and so on. David Eccles supplies lovely cartoons faithful to Ernest Shepard's originals. The volume has sold by the wagonload in Britain (where it appeared in 1999); some jokes may not cross the Atlantic ("What is the matter with Radio Four?") but many of them will. (Viking, $15 112p ISBN 0-670-03047-3; Oct.)
Domestic cats and kittens have always composed verse, but much of their work has yet to be translated from the original feline and Meow. Humorist Deborah Coates has come to the rescue with 150 Cat Haiku, accompanied with cute faux-Japanese line drawings: "Surprise! I can jump/ Through the newspaper while you/ Are still reading it!" (Warner, $13.95 paper 144p ISBN 0-446-67750-7; Sept.)
Translation Nation
Many American readers enjoy the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896—1981) in Jonathan Galassi's celebrated translations. Now Galassi (editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux) offers the first English translation of Montale's controversial Posthumous Diary. These fragmentary verses appeared in Italian after the poet's death, in editions supervised by his companion, Cima Isella; some Italian critics think she helped write it. Whatever their source, the disturbing and charming poems provide a window into the fears, pride and palimpsests of old age: "The bard is dead, long live his terminator." (Turtle Point [DAP, dist.], $16.95 paper 208p ISBN 1-885586-22-1; Dec.)
Mystical, versatile and sad, the poems (in verse and prose) of Tomas Tranströmer have made him Sweden's best-known living writer. Robert Bly (Eating the Honey of Words, etc.) has long championed Tranströmer; his latest effort in this line is The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer. Here are the dream and nightmare images that influenced U.S. poetry in the '60s, where "Moths settle down on the pane:/ small pale telegrams from the world." Here, too, are the brief, haunting works of more recent years: "I am carried inside/ my own shadow like a violin/ in its black case." (Graywolf, $14 paper 122p ISBN 1-55597-351-5; Nov.)
Some exclamatory and heartfelt, others mordant, whimsical or surreal, the pieces in Suites by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898—1936) are early, short-lined poetic sequences, here translated by the prolific Jerome Rothenberg (Poems for the Millennium, etc.): "In the little woodlets/ with their purples & magnesiums/ the princesitas jumping/ are baby sparkadillos." Many of these component poems and versets by Spain's modern master have never before appeared in English. (Green Integer [Consortium, dist.], $12.95 paper 240p ISBN 1-892295-61-X; Oct.)
The restless, energetic verse of Prague's surrealist writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900—1958) should delight and excite American readers: the urban rambles, lists and erotic promises of his Antilyrik & Other Poems echo Whitman, Apollinaire and Rimbaud: "Tell me you reed bouquet/ What city in the guts was I just crossing." The above Jerome Rothenberg and Czech expatriate Milos Sovak accompany their translation with a biographical postscript. (Green Integer [Consortium, dist.], $11.95 paper 160p ISBN 1-892295-79-X; Sept.)
French feminism meets experimental fractured narrative (they may or may not walk side by side, or fall in love) in Nude, by the Paris-based contemporary poet Anne Portugal; her pages and stanzas—some whimsical, others demanding—shine in an English translation by Norma Cole (Contrafact). (Kelsey Street [SPD, dist.], $12 paper 112p ISBN 0-932716-57-1; Sept.)
