What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages - oh, here is Jacob's room.'
Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast to adventures in Cambridge, London, and Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation. But Woolf keeps her scornful, charming protagonist at a distance, enveloping Jacob in mystery as he enters adulthood and the Great War
thunders across Europe. A daring work that reimagines every element of the traditional novel, Jacob's Room tells a new story for a new century.
In 1922, Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room 'a most wonderful achievement-more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal.' One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible mysteries of intimacy and mortality.
James Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait. Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature. An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W.
H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.
"Come now my right hand,
depict what demoniacally torments you,
but over it place
The Virgin's silver sheen
that at night masks the waters of the
marshy waste".
[...] The Journal of an Unseen April contains 49 poems in the form of journal entries, beginning on 1 April and ending on 7 May, and covers the whole period'of an unspecified Greek Easter (though some critics specify the year as being 1981 when Easter fell, as in the Journal, on 26 April). The prevailing atmosphere throughout the work is that of death, but death expressed as a transcendent, unseen life. The setting is the border area between the earthly and transcendent life; between the "now" and the "forever" of The Axion Esti. Its themes of departing and experience of what Elytis elsewhere has called the "after-death" acquired a new relevance in the month of April 1996, which came in the wake of his own departing and during which the translation was made. It was the first April without Elytis or, perhaps more correctly, the first April with an unseen Elytis. I dedicate the trans-lation to his unseen presence.
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