Overview

Tien Mai, the poet-narrator of Daniel Samoilovich's book-length sequence, Awaking Demons, is a self-exiled Vietnamese princeling grumpily eking out a hotel life in 1930s Switzerland. 'Here/ where even the butterflies are different' is a source of amusement and amazement to him as he details the behaviour of the hotel servants and the other guests, and the strange local customs. But more often his mind turns to the woman he has left behind: 'The distance between us is greater/than the empire of night', and to the consolations of Eastern art, especially the poets of the Tang dynasty, Wang Wei, Du Mu and Li Po. Like them, he stands at his lectern with his brushes, composing in meticulous calligraphy, in perfect ideograms, poems of nature, philosophy, memory and love, though against the backdrop of the Swiss lakes rather than the Yangtze river. Tien Mai is a rounded and subtle creation - querulous, humorous, cynical, profound, whimsical, romantic - and rather a wonderful lyric poet.

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9781848619364

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Daniel Samoilovich was born in Buenos Aires in 1949). He has published eleven books of poems, including Las Encantadas (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2003; translated as The Enchanted Isles, Shearsman, 2023), El carrito de Eneas (Buenos Aires, 2003) and Molestando a los demonios (Pre-textos, Madrid-Valencia, 2009). In 2020 Pre-textos published his Fabulas y fabulaciones, written in collaboration with the artist Eduardo Stupia. He is a translator from English, French and Latin, and has translated into Spanish the Latin poet Horace and, in collaboration with Mirta Rosenberg, Shakespeare (Henry IV). He edited the quarterly newspaper Diario de Poesia throughout its 83 editions from its foundation in Buenos Aires in 1986 to 2012. He has given lectures or seminars on poetry and poetics at the Casa Encendida and the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, as well as at the universities of Los Andes and Carabobo (Venezuela), Nacional (Colombia), Rosario and Buenos Aires (Argentina), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile), Puebla (Mexico) and Princeton (USA). Several collections of his work have been published, including La nuit avant de monter a bord (Quebec, 2001), Driven by the wind and drenched to the bone (Shoestring, Nottingham, 2007), and Siete colinas de jade (Conaculta, Mexico, 2015). In 2015, the publishing house Bajo la Luna published his ""collected"", Rusia es el tema, Obra Reunida 1973-2008.

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