Compiled in 1582, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain is one of the two principal sources of Nahuatl song, as well as a poetical window into the mindset of the Aztec people some sixty years after the conquest of Mexico. Presented as a cancionero, or anthology, in the mode of New Spain, the ballads show a reordering—but not an abandonment—of classic Aztec values. In the careful reading of John Bierhorst, the ballads reveal in no uncertain terms the pre-conquest Aztec belief in the warrior's paradise and in the virtue of sacrifice. This volume contains an exact transcription of the thirty-six Nahuatl song texts, accompanied by authoritative English translations. Bierhorst includes all the numerals (which give interpretive clues) in the Nahuatl texts and also differentiates the text from scribal glosses. His translations are thoroughly annotated to help readers understand the imagery and allusions in the texts. The volume also includes a helpful introduction and a larger essay, "On the Translation of Aztec Poetry," that discusses many relevant historical and literary issues. In Bierhorst's expert translation and interpretation, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain emerges as a song of resistance by a conquered people and the recollection of a glorious past. Announcing a New Digital Initiative http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/utdigital/ UT Press, in a new collaboration with the University of Texas Libraries, will publish an interactive digital adaptation of the Ballads that will expand the scholarly content beyond what is possible to publish in book form. The web site, to launch in conjunction with the book in July 2009, includes all of the printed book plus scans of the original codex, a normative transcription, and space to interact with the author and other scholars, as well as art, audio, a map, and other related material. The digital Ballads will be open access, bringing one of the university’s rare holdings to scholars around the world.

From the author of The Door, selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2015 An NYRB Classics Original Like Magda Szabó’s internationally acclaimed novel The Door, Iza’s Ballad is a striking story of the relationship between two women, in this case a mother and a daughter. Ettie, the mother, is old and from an older world than the rapidly modernizing Communist Hungary of the years after World War II. From a poor family and without formal education, Ettie has devoted her life to the cause of her husband, Vince, a courageous magistrate who had been blacklisted for political reasons before the war. Iza, their daughter, is as brave and conscientious as her father: Active in the resistance against the Nazis, she is now a doctor and a force for progress. Iza lives and works in Budapest, and when Vince dies, she is quick to bring Ettie to the city to make sure her mother is close and can be cared for. She means to do everything right, and Ettie is eager to do everything to the satisfaction of the daughter she is so proud of. But good intentions aside, mother and daughter come from two different worlds and have different ideas of what it means to lead a good life. Though they struggle to accommodate each other, increasingly they misunderstand and hurt each other, and the distance between them widens into an abyss. . . .

This study offers an introduction to an important branch of Spanish literature—the romance, or ballad. Although a great many of these poems have been translated into English by various authors, they are not generally known nor easily accessible. Collected here for the first time in a single volume is a broad and representative sampling of romances in translation that encompasses historical ballads (including those about Spain's greatest folk hero, el Cid), Moorish ballads, and ballads of chivalry, love, and adventure. For the collection, Shasta M. Bryant has written a perceptive commentary and critique in which he discusses the individual poems and compares the translation with the original; both texts are presented to facilitate comparison. For those who wish to pursue their reading further there is an index of romances that have been translated into English, along with the names of the translators. Although the text has been written with the non-specialist in mind, this book will be equally valuable for students of comparative literature and of medieval Spain.

Table V: Translations from the Swedish, s. 183-201.

Originally published by eth co-editor David Hadbawnik's habenicht press in 2012, Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the "currency" of the ballad alongside supply-side economics, Owens hails Wordworth's Lyric Ballads experiment (undertaken at the dawn of England's Industrial Age) as one touchstone. But he also understands the built-in obsolescence of the form, its tendency to hearken back to imaginary origins. "[E]veryone has an idea they know what a ballad is," Owens writes in his "Working Notes." "It's this degraded thing shot through with a sense of pastness, cultural infancy and a charming but sometimes dangerous rusticity that needs to be carefully framed and reined." Thus Owens' Ballads playfully engage with language, figures, and forms from medieval and early modern England, with nods to the caesura-based, alliterative line, and Barbara Allan, Thomas the Rhymer, and Piers Plowman making appearances in the book's brief lyrics.

For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico García Lorca, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great García Lorca. Poet in Spain invokes the "wild, innate, local surrealism" of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio's ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets--addressed to Lorca's homosexual lover--which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time and the play Blood Wedding--also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism--showing the poet's work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, W.D. Snodgrass's SELECTED TRANSLATIONS offers us the imaginative power and the playful wisdom of poems, folk songs, fables, street songs, drinking lyrics, ballads, and art songs gleaned from more than 500 years of Western tradition. Whether from Hungary, Scandinavia, Italy, Romania, Poland, France, or Germany, these poetic translations are sure to delight.

A tale of love and honor in which Rosendo Arbona discovers that his young wife Dominga is missing. When he learns that she has run away with one of the young farm workers, Rosendo embarks on what will become a an almost mythic journey to find Dominga, avenge his honor, and discover the deeper purpose of his travels.