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Old 01-06-2012, 08:27 AM   #3
Hamlet53
Nameless Being
 
I have two suggestions:

The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly

Tomas Tranströmer was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. I had never heard of him before that, and I have since only managed to read a couple of his poems available online, those being very nice.

Unfortunately this book is not available as an ebook; in fact it appears no collection of his poems are. More about Tranströmer and his poems from Amazon:

Quote:
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."
(Amazon link)


Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (translated by Seamus Heaney)

I do specifically nominate the Seamus Heaney (also a Nobel Prize Winner 1995) translation of Beowulf.

This is available as an ebook (Inkmesh Result) though it is rather pricey. It should also be easily obtainable as a used paperback or in public libraries as it was a bestseller when it was first released. More about this book from Amazon:


Quote:
The national bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Award. Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on, physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths that are permanent and liberating.
(Amazon Link).

That's three good suggestions (IMHO) so far.

Last edited by Hamlet53; 01-06-2012 at 09:09 AM.
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