Barbarian Press ~ Canada
(Jan and Crispin Elsted)

Under Strange Sail
Translations and Improvisations from Many Hands
By Doris Kareva, Willem van Toorn, Fereydoun Faryad, and others
Mission, Canada: 2007. Edition of 115.

13.75 x 21" portfolio with 16 sheets of various sizes laid-in. Printed with a variety of typefaces on vintage Barcham Green papers and on new hand-made sheets from Canada and the Czech Republic. Contained in folded and printed portfolio of heavy waterleaf paper with stiff backing. Includes a title sheet, a colophon, and notes on the poets and translators.

Barbarian Press: "Sometimes a subject settles itself into the foreground of one’s thoughts and, with the calm certitude of a cat on a windowsill, refuses to budge. Such a subject for us over the last few months has been the translation of poetry. ...

"This is a suite of a dozen separately designed broadsheets. The languages represented include classical Greek, Estonian, Dutch, Farsi, French, & German, the poets ranging from Sappho and Pindar to contemporary poets like Doris Kareva, Willem van Toorn, and Fereydoun Faryad, including along the way Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others. The translators include Albert Moritz, Robert Bringhurst, Scott King, Francis Jones, Manfred Meurer, and Crispin Elsted. One of Ronsard’s sonnets is translated by John Pass, 2006 winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry; a recently discovered new poem by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale is translated for the first time into English by John Francis Phillimore, and three of Doris Kareva’s poems are translated from Estonian by an acquaintance of many years, Toomas Ilves, who just last October, by happy coincidence, was elected President of Estonia."
$495