Christopher Maurer Bücher

A Pocket Mirror for Heroes serves as a reflective guide, showcasing the person one is or aspires to be. Its author delivers concise wisdom, offering a vivid portrayal of ethical and moral perfection for all to strive toward. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, long forgotten until its 1992 republication, has become a New York Times bestseller. Gracian, a Spanish Jesuit, is often seen as superior to Machiavelli in strategy and insight, setting a new benchmark for living and achieving. This benchmark emphasizes heroism—becoming "the consummate person," characterized by accurate judgment, mature taste, attentive listening, wise speech, and shrewd actions. He encourages readers to embody greatness, to be "a miracle of perfection." Essential qualities for heroism include wit, wisdom, courage, elegance, grace, humility, and spontaneity. However, wisdom alone isn't sufficient; one must also learn to manage their talents and differentiate true qualities from their shadows. This work offers "a politics for governing oneself, a compass for sailing toward excellence, and an art for reaching distinction," making it a wise and witty companion for those who appreciate the challenges of daily life.

A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work And I who was walking with the earth at my waist, saw two snowy eagles and a naked girl. The one was the other and the girl was neither. -from "Qasida of the Dark Doves" Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading García Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who-as Maurer says in his illuminating introduction-"spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."

New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germ n Belli. This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germ n Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the "red midnight sun" of hope. Belli's contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its "azure cloister." Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli's original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This volume also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish in this bilingual edition.