First published in the 1950s to international acclaim, Margarita Liberaki's allegorical novel, The Other Alexander, speaks to the opposing forces inherent in human nature. This exquisite poetic drama reenacts Greek tragedy in its evocation of a country riven by civil war and a family divided against itself. A tyrannical father leads a double life; he has two families and gives the same first names to both sets of children. In an atmosphere of increasing unease and mistrust, the half-siblin...

A collection of Gnostic texts spanning centuries, geographical locations, and cultural traditions—“a wonderful achievement” (Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels)Gnosticism was a wide-ranging religious movement of the first millennium CE—with earlier antecedents and later flourishings—whose adherents sought salvation through knowledge and personal religious experience. Gnostic writings offer striking perspectives on both early Christian and non-Chr...

A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet—with a wealth of materials for understanding her work—by a prize-winning poet and translatorSappho’s thrilling lyric verse has been unremittingly popular for more than 2,600 years—certainly a record for poetry of any kind—and love for her art only increases as time goes on. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete po...

The people we’ve come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty—beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity—i...

The words of Jesus Christ are restored to their original poetic form in this extraordinary volume.Jesus Christ, whose teachings have been on the lips of millions for two millennia, is revealed here as one of the greatest poets of all time. What happened to deafen us to the poetic nature of his words? In migrating from Aramaic speech into written Greek translation, and later into English translation, the lyrics got locked up as prose.In The Poems of Jesu...

Saint John’s poetry of love and joy describes the soul’s passage through dark night to final illumination in mystical union with Absolute Being. The allegory the poet uses is that of earthly love, and the poems are strikingly effective on the immediate level of personal experience, quite apart from their theological meanings.Many critics regard the work of Saint John of the Cross (1542-91), the 16th-century mystic, to be among the finest poetry Spain has produced. ...

Written during an astonishing outburst of creativity during a period of only two weeks in February 1922, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus is one of the great poetic works of the twentieth century. Willis Barnstone brings these striking poems into English with an approach honed through years of work on the philosophy of translation, about which he has written extensively. This dual-language edition allows readers to compare versions face-to-face to get a clear sense of the nuances of th...

A collection of interviews now available from New Directions for the first timeThe words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson) and familiar themes — labyrinths, mystic experiences, and death — and always with great, throw-away humor. For example, discussing nightmares, he concludes,“Whe...

A vivid, contemporary translation of the greatest Greek love poet by the prize-winning poet and translator.Sappho’s lyric love poems, composed in the seventh century B.C.E., transcend time and place and continue to enchant readers today. Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, the passionate elegance of her musings on life and death, loss and longing, desire, and nature speak volumes.Willis Barnstone...

“The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way . . . with evocative simplicity.” —Robert Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California, BerkeleyThe world’s greatest poetry resides in the Bible, yet these major poets are traditionally rendered into prose. In this pioneering volume of biblical poets translated in English, Willis Barnstone restores the lyricism and power of the poets’ voices in both the New a...

Willis Barnstone is a poet, translator, biblical scholar, memoirist, anthologist, teacher, and painter. If we are to grasp his greatest contribution to culture over the course of his professional life, we can focus on his role first and foremost as a poet – a lover of words, both his own and those of others, and on what he believes are sacred words from our earliest written records down to present day mystics and poets. What he is carrying across borders is no less than what his fellow poe...

It came to pass, when Jesus had risen from the dead, that he passed eleven years discoursing with his disciples, and instructing them. The Apostles wrote down what Jesus taught them during those eleven years, resulting in The Pistis Sophia, the most important Gnostic scripture. Includes an extensive commentary by Samael Aun Weor.