Bøger af Charles Reznikoff

Vi søgte en æstetik, vi kunne leve med, og vi søgte den gen­nem vores amerikanske rødder, vores eget land. Vi havde lært på Landbrugsskolen, at der blev skrevet poesi i vores egen tid, og at det ikke var nødvendigt at fordybe sig i akademisk viden for at skrive; vi behøvede ikke andet end de veje, vi rejste på.Fra A til Z er et fyldigt udvalg af den amerikanske maler og digter Mary Oppens selvbiografi om hendes liv sammen med digteren George Oppen samt digte og andre tekster af de fire vigtigste “objektivister”: digterne Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff og Louis Zukofsky, som hermed for første gang præsenteres på dansk i et dækkende historisk, politisk, socialt og kunstnerisk perspektiv.

Available again for the first time since 1978--and complete in one volume--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry.

A novel about a Jewish immigrant family at the turn of the century ¿ from Czarist Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn. This is poet Charles Reznikoff¿s finest fiction.By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff¿s first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman, and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia, to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel¿s protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul.Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff¿s subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants, struggling for their place in a new world.Milton Hindus wrote, ¿Both Whitman and Reznikoff are singers and chroniclers of the American island, the name of which derives from the language (Manna-hatta) of its original inhabitants. Reznikoff¿s title also includes an allusion to the waters of Babylon beside which the prophet sat down and wept. The American Jew, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1894 and whose parents had emigrated from Czarist Russia some years before that date, evidently felt, like the hero of one of the novels of George Gissing, that he had been `born in exile¿. But the reader should not, on this account, be expecting a tearful immigrant narrative, for if Reznikoff was a student of the Bible he was also a student of another student of the Bible, the philosopher Spinoza. From this stoic master, he had learned neither to laugh nor cry but to try to understand.¿

In Holocaust poet Charles Reznikoff¿s subject is people¿s suffering at the hand of another. His source materials are the U.S. government¿s record of the trials of the Nazi criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the transcripts of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Except for the twelve part titles, none of the words here are Reznikoff¿s own: instead he has created, through selection, arrangement, and the rhythms of the testimony set as verse on the page, a poem of witness by the perpetrators and the survivors of the Holocaust. He lets the terrible history unfold¿in history¿s own words.