ARMAND SCHWERNER

THE TABLETS: SELECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

Written over the course of decades, The Tablets, are an imagined trove of Assyriological texts that Armand Schwerner used to explore the nature of translation, interpretation, and the way language generates meaning. Schwerner inhabits the persona of a scholar translator who offers tentative and often contradictory readings of the texts. The poem performs an ersatz archeology full of discoveries that are equal parts comic and spiritual. Assembled here in this volume along with *The Tablets* is a generous selection of Schwerner's translations and shorter poems.

"It was Schwerner's genius to transform his materials ("availabilities," he called them) into deeply moving near-spiritual texts. These imaginative constructions, from the genre-breaking Tablets to the poems ad translations, constitute a wealth of every-inventive, playful material, subtle in their reflective and transformative powers. They manifest the marks of classical genius, combining a feeling of surprise at each turn of the writing with a sense of its inevitability."

-Michael Heller, from the introduction

ISBN 978-1-7374307-9-7

$29