We’re delighted to announce today that, at long last, THE AZURE CLOISTER has arrived at The University of Chicago Press Distribution Center. Now is a great time to pre-order — it won’t be long until the order is fulfilled. You can order directly from The University of Chicago Press, from Amazon, IndieBound, and other booksellers. As always, we encourage shopping local and frequenting your community library, too.
THE AZURE CLOISTER is a truly remarkable and inspiring volume of poetry by the distinguished Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli, exquisitely and sensitively translated by the late Professor Karl Maurer (1948-2015), and edited posthumously by his brother Professor Christopher Maurer (Boston University). This is the first major English translation of Carlos Germán Belli’s work.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature, says about these poems: “I began reading Belli when he published his first poems, back in the fifties, in a magazine called Mercurio Peruano, and I needed only to read those half dozen texts to feel that this was a new voice, of powerful lyrical worth and great imaginative audacity, capable — as only great poets are — of transforming ugliness into beauty, sadness into stimulation, and turning to gold — that is to poetry — whatever he touches. All that Carlos Germán Belli has written since then has only confirmed and enriched his extraordinary gift of poetry.”
THE AZURE CLOISTER is published in a bilingual edition. Learn more about Carlos Germán Belli from The Poetry Foundation.