Written by Pascal Mercier
Translated from German by Barbara Harshav
Living a life practically preserved in amber like the classical languages he teaches at a Swiss lycée, Raimund Gregorius (whom everyone calls "Mundus") is jolted out of his routine one morning by a random act on his way to school. This sets off a train of events that leads him to a search for a Portuguese physician who has been dead for thirty years. Yet the search for Amadeu de Prado also becomes a search for Mundus’s own life and possibilities not followed.
Night Train to Lisbon, an international best-seller that has sold over two million copies, skillfully combines the conventions of the Bildungsroman and the mystery genre in a densely textured narrative that explores the impact of human relations on life choices.
Barbara Harshav has translated over forty works of fiction, poetry, drama, and history from German, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Her translations include Yitzhak Zuckerman’s A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, The Labor of Life: Selected Plays of Hanoch Levin, and (with her husband, Benjamin Harshav) The Complete Yiddish Poems of Menke Katz. She also teaches a translation workshop at Yale University and is the current vice-president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
Translated from French by Norman R. Shapiro
This window into the poetry of French women from the Middle Ages to the present contains over 600 poems in a bilingual format. A substantial introduction for each of the three chronological divisions — the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries — provides a general overview of each era, and a brief biography of each poet supplies additional context.
The breadth and depth of the selections allow readers to follow the changing as well as constant features of this important genre. French Women Poets of Nine Centuries is the first anthology of its kind and an ideal anthology for all world literature courses.
Norman R. Shapiro has been one of the foremost translators of French literature for almost four decades. He teaches Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University, and his numerous translations include The Fabulists French: Verse Fables of Nine Centuries; One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine; and The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine.
