The Second Seedtime
Notebooks, 1980-94
Philippe Jaccottet
Translated by Tess Lewis
Forthcoming
5 x 8.5 inches, 208 pp. November 2017
ISBN : 9780857424341
Rs 699.00 (HB)
$24.50 (HB)
£18.99 (HB)
Buy (HB) Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerland’s most prominent and prolific men of letters, Jaccottet has published more than a dozen books of poetry and criticism.
One of Europe’s finest contemporary poets, Jaccottet is a writer of exacting attention. Through keen observations of the natural world, of art, literature, music, and reflections on the human condition, Jaccottet opens his readers’ eyes to the transcendent in everyday life. The Second Seedtime is a collection of “things seen, things read, and things dreamed.” The volume continues the project Jaccottet began three decades earlier in his first volume of notebooks, Seedtime. Here, again, he gathers flashes of beauty dispersed around him like seeds that may blossom into poems or moments of inspiration. He returns, insistently, to such literary touchstones as Dante, Montaigne, Góngora, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Brontë, and Dickinson, as well as musical greats including Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell, and Schubert. The Second Seedtime is the vivid chronicle of one man’s passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit, and the natural world.
Philippe Jaccottet’s most recent collections of poems and poetic prose texts include Cahier de verdure (Notebook of Greenery, 1990), Après beau- coup d’années (After Many Years, 1994), Et, néanmoins (And, Nonetheless, 2001) and Ce Peu de bruits (These Slight Noises, 2008). His prizes include the Petrarch Prize and the Schiller Prize (2010), the highest Swiss literary distinction. In 2014, his collected writings were published in Gallimard’s pres- tigious ‘Pléiade’ series, a rare honor for a living author.
Tess Lewis has translated seven books and numerous essays and articles from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Julya Rabinowich, Lukas B�rfuss, Philippe Jaccottet, Pascal Bruckner and Jean-Luc Benoziglio among others. She has been awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship. She also serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for various literary journals and newspapers.
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