Geltinger’s second novel traces a lavishly descriptive path through the titular landscape—finely rendered in Booth’s translation. —Publishers Weekly

Congratulations to NER author Alexander Booth on his recent translation of Gunther Geltinger’s German Moor. Moor is . . . a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood.

Booth is a writer and translator currently living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations appeared in NER 37.3.

Moor can be purchased from the University of Chicago Press and other booksellers in December.

 

 

Benjamin Ehrlich’s careful translation lets English-speakers explore Ramón y Cajal’s dreams, which reveal the vulnerability of one of the world’s greatest neuroscientists. In a lucid introduction, Ehrlich lays out the parallels and final divergence of Freud’s and Cajal’s scientific lives. —Laura Otis, PhD, Emory University

NER staff reader and author Benjamin Ehrlich is publishing the first English translation of the lost dream diary of Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, illustrated with Cajal’s own sketches. The text is accompanied by an introduction to the life and work of Cajal, his relationship with the famed Viennese psychoanalyst, Freud, and the historical context surrounding the contributions of two great dueling intellects. Ehrlich’s translation of Cajal’s Café Chats has appeared previously in NER and can be viewed here.

Cajal (1852–1934) explored the microscopic world of the brain and found a landscape inhabited by distinctly individual cells, later termed neurons. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” he called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” Although he ranks among the greatest scientists in history, the name of the Nobel Prize-winning “father of modern neuroscience” is not as well-known. Before he was a neuroanatomist Cajal conducted psychiatric experiments and before Freud, his contemporary, became a psychiatrist, he worked in neuroanatomy. In public, Cajal spoke respectfully about Freud, but in private, Cajal rejected the man and his theories. In order to disprove Freud’s “lies,” Cajal started to record his own dreams in a diary, part of a notably personal book project, which he worked on from 1918 until his death in 1934. For reasons unknown, Cajal never published this work. Until recently, it was assumed that the manuscript had been destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.

Benjamin Ehrlich is a Salzburg Global Fellow. His work has appeared in Nautilus and NER 33.1. He is a co-founding editor of the Beautiful Brain, an online magazine devoted to art and neuroscience. Ben graduated from Middlebury College with Highest Honors in Literary Studies and currently serves as a nonfiction reader for NER.

The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal is now available for pre-order and will be released on December 13, 2016 by Oxford University Press.

 

 

This impressive yet approachable selection . . . offers an excellent introduction to his relentlessly crafted work. —Publishers Weekly

Replacing an earlier selected, Paul Muldoon publishes Selected Poems 1968-2014 this month from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Muldoon, originally from Ireland, is Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University, Bread Loaf School of English faculty, and poetry editor of the New Yorker. His most recent collections are Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). His essays on Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, and Seamus Heaney have appeared in NER 23.4, 24.2, and 34.2, respectively.

Selected Poems may be purchased from FS&G, or from your local independent bookseller.