Awaking Demons

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.

"Samoilovich deals in the kind of poem, of such perfect sensibility, that current times seemed to have banished forever." -Pedro Rey, La Nación, Buenos Aires

"In his distancing, his chosen strangeness, Samoilovich combines an omnipresent irony with a lyricism of subtle melancholy, demonstrating that, as Pessoa, that master of masks, said, the true poet is a great impostor (even when he seems to be speaking in his own voice)." -Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, Madrid

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 also published his 'Fábulas y fabulaciones', written in collaboration with the artist Eduardo Stupía. He is a translator from English, French and Latin, and has translated the Latin poet Horace into Spanish, and, in collaboration with Mirta Rosenberg, Shakespeare's 'Henry IV'. He edited the quarterly newspaper 'Diario de Poesía' 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), São Paulo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile), Puebla (Mexico) and Princeton (USA). Several collections of his work have been published, including 'La nuit avant de monter à bord' (Québec, 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 poems, 'Rusia es el tema, Obra Reunida 1973-2008'.

Terence Dooley's translations of Mariano Peyrou's 'The Year of the Crab' and Eduardo Moga's 'My Father' were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. He has also translated Eduardo Moga's Selected Poems, and his anthology 'Streets where to walk is to embark: Spanish Poets in London' as well as books by Mario Martín Gijón and Mercedes Cebrián. His own poems, 'The Why of It', are published by The Argent Press. Terence Dooley is Penelope Fitzgerald's literary executor and has edited her essays, 'A House of Air', and her letters, 'So I Have Thought of You' for 4th Estate.