Max Jacob, central figure of early 20th-century Parisian bohemia along with Picasso and Apollinaire, was active at the emergence of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. But in spite of his close connections with modernism - epitomized by his seminal book of prose poems Le Cornet a des (1916) - Jacob remains a marginal figure. His Breton-Jewish otherness, conversion to Catholicism, and death under the Nazis in 1944 adds to the enigma and shifts the critical focus further still. But Jacobs poetic playfulness - his many-faceted irony, wordplay, narrative heterogeneity, tragi-comedy, self- reflexivity and polyphony - may begin to offer insights into his esprit createur, which, true to the (post)modernist vision, is not to be found in the usual ways. For the aim of Max Jacob, connoisseur of traditional storytelling as well as spearhead of the literary vanguard, is to jolt the unconscious, the energetic kernel of creativity.

Max Jacob was born on July 12, 1876, at Quimper, Brittany, to Alsatian-Jewish parents of modest means, his father being a tailor and part-time antique dealer. Although Jacob proved at first to be a mediocre student, he displayed a lightning-like intelligence from an early age. He was also beset by numerous manias. Inordinately sensitive, he accused his schoolmates of persecuting him and complained that his brothers beat him and that his authoritarian mother mistreated him at home. -- Pg. XI.

By using the concept of play as a common denominator, this book outlines ways in which literary creativity can act as a free, open, and speculatively unburdened version of religious concerns. Contributors include Louis Dupré, Arthur Quinn, Sanford Budick, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Judah Goldin, and Jean-Michel Heimonet.

The book examines the relationship between translation and original creation in the works of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, suggesting that translation can be seen as a poetic principle which can be related to the poet’s original works, too. The book offers a detailed discussion of all the translation projects Bishop undertook throughout her life (from Ancient Greek, French, Portuguese and Spanish), both published and unpublished. They are seen in the context of her life and work, and analyzed with particular regard for the features which are relevant in relationship to Bishop’s own works. Bishop’s work as a translator has not been explored thoroughly yet, despite the huge critical interest in Bishop in the last decades, and one of the aim of the book is to offer such exploration. The second part of the book focuses on the ways Bishop’s interest in translation and her experience of a translator is manifested in her original works. Bishop’s poems are read with particular attention paid to the features which relate them to translation, particularly the complex interaction between the foreign and the familiar, which is examined not only in her poems dealing with exotic places (namely Brazil), but also in texts dealing with more familiar topics and locations. The final chapter argues that a crucial role in Bishop’s works is played by the unknown – that which is impossible to understand and translate fully. The book also suggests that, on a more general level, a type of poetics which shares certain key features with translation could be defined.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.