Description
Poetry. This is a bilingual (English-Persian) collection of poems about cats by Stanley H. Barkan, translated into Persian by Sepideh Zamani and edited by Joan and John Digby. "I have always loved cats. I ve been called The Catman of Merrick. Two of my cats were housecats: Pyewacket, an all black cat, my familiar, who was hit-and-run killed by a wild teenager (I'm told by a witness), but, in my way of thinking, was taken in place of my daughter, who was in the hospital for three operations regarding her having four kidneys, two of which became nephritic; and Pumpernickel, who was a very large bushy-tailed Maine Coon, who, when I walked with him on a leash, cats stopped, backed up, wondering 'What in hell is that?' She and her boyfriend Tawney are buried in my backyard. The other cats I counted as mine were two feral litters by Dorothy: First, Nero & Oreo; then Chico, Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo. After Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo left early on to find their own territories, Harpo and Dorothy stayed. Dorothy, who was quite old by then, went out into a stormy night and never returned. Harpo, years later, the same. Now I'm unhappily catless in Merrick, seeking a kitten to be totally housebound like my daughter's cat. I'm truly grateful to Sepideh Zamani for selecting the cat poems in this edition for translating into Persian. I'm also most grateful to Joan and John Digby, both cat lovers (consider the name of their press) for agreeing to publish PUMPERNICKEL."—Stanley H. Barkan, from the Preface
Author Bio
Stanley H. Barkan, born in Brooklyn, New York, is a poet, translator, editor, and publisher. He grew up in East New York among many who fled Nazi-dominated Europe. He was fascinated by the languages they spoke and the stories they told of how and why they left Europe. This interest in other languages formed the basis of his life and work as a cross- culturalist, avidly seeking to learn languages. Throughout Barkan's 27 years as a teacher in the New York high school system, he acquainted himself with the poetry of many other-language poets, and, eventually, the works of great translators, like Gregory Rabassa, with whom he developed a singular friendship. Eventually, as a small press publisher, he published a number of other-language poets, in 59 different languages to date. His own poetry has been published in 25 different editions, in 28 different languages, including several bilingual ones (Bulgarian, Chinese, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish). The Dutch edition of AS YET UNBORN is his tenth different other- language edition. His most recent awards include: 2016 [Trapani, Sicily] L'Occhio di Scammacca (sculpture) Sicilian award; 2016 [in China] The Homer European Medal of Poetry and Art; 2018 [in Paris] Poetry Prize of European Academy of Sciences Arts and Literature. His latest books are More Mishpocheh (Swansea, Wales: The Seventh Quarry Press, 2018) and Wiersze wybrane [Selected Poems], translated into Polish by Adam Szyper & Tomasz Marek Sobieraj (Lodz, Poland: Editions Sur Ner, 2018).
Author City: MERRICK, NY USA
Sepideh Zamani, born in Iran, graduated from law school in 1999 and moved to the United States a year later. Her essays, short stories, and novels focus on immigration, gender inequality, and the lives of ethnic and religious minorities under cultural cleansing and forced assimilation. Her book collections include: Barbuda, short stories, published in Persian in 2016; Ouroboros, her first novel, published in London in 2018; and Women Looking at the Sky, short stories, published in Persian in 2019.
Author City: POTOMAC, MD USA