He and I Author:Emmanuel Moses Marilyn Hacker's sharp and haunting translations of He and I give us a poet both distant and intimate, cool and burning with urgency, alienated and tender, a poet of age and youth, of casual wealth and shabby poverty, of the exile's evanescent location and elusive emotion: "Sometimes he sees his despair / as a veil / and at others / as wh... more »at raises the veil." A cousin to Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito, Moses' alter ego Mr. Nobody is a quintessential Wandering Jew, seeking "nothing less than the infinite," even among the cruelties of our age.
--Alicia Ostriker Marilyn Hacker is truly one of this country's greatest translators; her work is distinguished by technical subtlety, deep knowledge of the French language, and the sensibility of a first-class poet. Her translation of Emmanuel Moses' He and I introduces a vital, ambitious new poet to American readers. Moses' poems are elegant and complex, evoking an array of historical settings and shifting personae (from Chopin to Breughel to the hapless Mr. Nobody), often returning directly or obliquely to the poet's affection for his father. By turns violent and witty, melancholy and thoughtful, He and I deserves a wide readership and high praise.
--Kevin Prufer Emmanuel Moses' intriguing poems range from Christ to Napoleon, medieval Orleans to present-day Majorca and Istanbul. His emotional reach is equally wide, by turns witty, ironic, poignant and self-deprecating, as he "explore[s] psychic space in all its dimensions." Marilyn Hacker meets the challenge with her customary precision of diction, her acute sensitivity to nuance and tone. Her deft translations of this "poete sans frontieres" will expand the boundaries of English poetry.