Rosmarie Waldrop

"Edmond Jabes (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of France's most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jabes's primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jabes, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jabes as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jabes's work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jabes's own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism."--BOOK JACKET.

The legacy of cultural imperialism, the consequences of gender, and the marginalization of the conquered are themes that combine and comment, one on the other, in Rosmarie Waldrop's remarkable new work, A Key into the Language of America. As "formally adventurous" (A.L. Nielson, Washington Review) as ever, German-born Waldrop has based her new collection on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams's 1643 guide (of the same name) to Narragansett Indian language and lore.

Alain Veinstein's reading of Andre Du Bouchet, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, published by Julian Kabza, Annex Press, Ithaca New York, 1983. Staple bound paperback, 8" x 8".

Contains incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic. Three essays on translation struggle with the sources and targets of translation, or the degree of strangeness a translator should allow into any English translation. Other essays examine the two-way traffic between reading and writing.

"These two novels explore the themes of physical and emotional exile and "between-ness." Each is relevant, accessible, and written with a rich blend of poetic language and withering critique. Writing to her sister, the narrator of the first novel tries to come to terms with her ancestry: What did her parents, two "ordinary people" in Nazi Germany, really stand for? How does their bad marriage resonate in the lives of their daughters? The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter aks whether we can really know the past or its place in our lives.". "In A Form/of Taking/It All, Rosmarie Waldrop measures the highly subjective experience of her narrator in contemporary Mexico City against the historical, scientific, and political discourses that control her personal experience. Written as an epic collage, A Form/of Taking/It All is an innovative exploration of such disparate elements as Columbus's discoveries and the formulation of quantum theory, presented in an elaborate web of interactions that stretch the bounds of language."--BOOK JACKET.

Do Wittgenstein and water mix? Philosophy and the facts of everyday life? The remarkable prose poems in Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles prove that startling new insights are possible when philosophical formulations are turned on their heads. The poet comments “I used Wittgenstein’s phrases in a free, unsystematic way, sometimes quoting, sometimes letting them spark what they would, sometimes substituting different nouns within a phrase (e g., his famous anti-metaphysical statement that ’the deepest questions are no questions at all’ becomes ’You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all’).”

"Stella and Victor, who meet, fall in love and marry soon after meeting in Europe, blissfully sail back to the states to meet Victor's family. And then the honeymoon is over, for Victor's family, dominated by his manipulative mother, find Stella pretentious and aloof. In truth, Stella is a free spirit and their marriage starts to fall apart when Victor begins siding with his family instead of his wife."--Goodreads

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....

"In her new volume of prose poem "dialogues," Reluctant Gravities, Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Laun of Excluded Middle, Rechktant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. As the author herself says, she "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Instead, her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text." Yet the overriding point of the dialogues is determinedly human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging", "Depression," "Desire," and even "The Millennium.""--BOOK JACKET.

"Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening 'spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.' Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet."--