Arc Classics: New Translations of Great Poets of the Past

Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia's great 19th century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and iterary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.

Never published in verse form before, these translations of some of the earliest known German poetry give us a rich glimpse of a life that, while alien in so many ways, was not so different after all. The Minnesang poets, for example, engage in a highly professional ritual, but compose in cognitive metaphors that still ring true: love is a trap; love is a game; love is war. A beautiful, lyrical journey through the passions and fears of pre-Medieval German life, told by some of its finest poetic voices.

The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change – the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann – and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Here we find poems about love (and love-hate), birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people; about spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and faraway places. The poet's voice is by turns ironical, angry and compassionate, his words charged with anguish, desire and rapture.

A genuinely unique European treasure, this volume bristles with all 33 of Rognvaldr's verses from the Orkneyinga Saga. While full of highly stylised, often grotesque images, the poems convey the skill, vigour and daring of the original. Rich narratives and old Norse mythology blend with familiar place-names and landscapes to create a peculiarly alluring, sometime comic, world that never quite settles around the reader, as if time travel is possible from a favourite armchair.