Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth: Nuer Song

Terese Svoboda

ISBN 10: 0912678631 / ISBN 13: 9780912678634

Published by The Greenfield Review Press, 1985

About this Item

Signed and date 1993 by Terese Svoboda. A very good copy. Seller Inventory # 007067

Bibliographic Details

Title: Cleaned the Crocodile's Teeth: Nuer Song

Publisher: The Greenfield Review Press

Publication Date: 1985

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Very Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Poetry. The Nuer are a cattle herding people who live along the Nile. Although only a half million in population, they were made world famous by anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard's classic "The Nuer." Song is the art form most suited to their harsh climate and semi-nomadic existence. CLEANED THE CROCODILE'S TEETH was translated by Terese Svoboda, who collected and transcribed them in the Sudan with the aid of a PEN/Columbia Fellowship. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for the completion of the project. However, CLEANED THE CROCODILE'S TEETH is more than just the translation of these songs. Its linking narrative, which chronicles Svoboda's experiences and places the songs in their proper contexts, takes us along on the translator's sometimes difficult journey and gives us an even deeper glimpse into the often hard, but never hopeless lives of the Nuer. Svoboda is also the author of ALL ABERRATION, a book of poetry published by the University of Georgia Press.

About the Author:

Terese Svoboda is the translator of CLEANED THE CROCODILE'S TEETH: NUER SONG (Greenfield Review Press, 1985) and the author of All Aberration (University of Georgia Press, 1985), Laughing Africa (University of Iowa Press, 1991), Treason (Zoo Press, 2003), Mere Mortals (University of Georgia Press, 2009), Weapons Grade (University of Arkansas, 2009), and WHEN THE NEXT BIG WAR BLOWS DOWN THE VALLEY: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS (Anhinga Press, 2015), and the chapbook Dogs Are Not Cats. A recent Guggenheim recipient, she has won the Iowa Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award and the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant.

A fellow at Bellagio, Bogliasco, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and the NEH, she also received a PEN/Columbia fellowship to translate Nuer song. She has taught at Williams, Columbia's School of the Arts, Southampton/Stony Brook, the New School, San Francisco State, William and Mary, Fairleigh Dickinson, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Universities of Tampa, Miami, and Hawaii, Fordham, and Wichita State, in St. Petersburg and Kenya for the Summer Literary Program, and held the McGee Professor at Davidson College. Also the author of six books of fiction, a memoir, and a book of translation from the Nuer, she will publish a biography of the radical poet Lola Ridge in 2016.