From the Publisher
The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of
the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal
experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body
of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium
and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a
translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the
centuries with remarkable power and beauty-beginning with texts
from the earliest years of Christianity-including material from the
Nag Hammadi library-and continuing all the way up to expressions of
gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the
Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact
introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas-and they also
provide an entrée to the pleasures of gnostic literature in
general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of
that tradition. <iframe title="YouTube video player"
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About the Author
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin,
Columbia, the Sorbonne, and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of
the civil war (1949-51), and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War.
During the Cultural Revolution he went to China where he was later
a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University
(1984-85). Former O''Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate
University, he is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature
and Spanish at Indiana University.
His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam,
1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984), Poetics
of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale, 1993),
Funny Ways of Staying Alive (University Press of New
England, 1993), The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (University
Press of New England, 1996), the memoir With Borges on an
Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (University of Illinois,
1993), Algebra of Night: Selected Poems-1949-1998 (Sheep
Meadow, 1999), The Apocalypse (New Directions, 2000),
Life Watch (BOA Editions, 2003), Border of a Dream:
Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon, 2003), and The
Gnostic Bible (Shambhala Publications, 2003).
A Guggenheim Fellow, his awards include a National Endowment for
the Arts award, a National Endowment for the Humanities award, an
Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, a W. H.
Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Midland
Authors Award, three Book of the Month Selections and four Pulitzer
Prize nominations for poetry. His work has appeared in American
Poetry Review, Doubletake, Harper''s, New York Review of Books,
Poetry, Paris Review Poetry, Partisan Review, the New
Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement.
About the Book
The people we've come to call gnostics were passionate advocates of the view that salvation comes through knowledge and personal experience, and their passion shines through in the remarkable body of writings they produced over a period of more than a millennium and a half. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer have created a translation that brings the gnostic voices to us from across the centuries with remarkable power and beauty--beginning with texts from the earliest years of Christianity--including material from the Nag Hammadi library--and continuing all the way up to expressions of gnostic wisdom found within Islam and in the Cathar movement of the Middle Ages. The twenty-one texts included here serve as a compact introduction to Gnosticism and its principal ideas--and they also provide an entree to the pleasures of gnostic literature in general, representing, as they do, the greatest masterpieces of that tradition.
