Louise Landes Levi

Louise Landes Levi is a poet, musician, translator and nomad. She was a founding member of Daniel Moore's Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, Americas first fusion orchestra. She traveled through Afghanistan in the late 1960s, and journeyed alone to India, via Istanbul, Tabriz, Mashed, Herat, Khandahar, Kabul, Peshawar, Rawalpundi and Lahore. In India she studied the North Indian traditions of music and poetry, from which she later made several translations, including one of Mira, an Indian...See more

Louise Landes Levi is a poet, musician, translator and nomad. She was a founding member of Daniel Moore's Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, Americas first fusion orchestra. She traveled through Afghanistan in the late 1960s, and journeyed alone to India, via Istanbul, Tabriz, Mashed, Herat, Khandahar, Kabul, Peshawar, Rawalpundi and Lahore. In India she studied the North Indian traditions of music and poetry, from which she later made several translations, including one of Mira, an Indian singer-saint of the 16th century ( Sweet On My Lips: The Love Poems of Mira Bai, Cool Grove Press, 1997 & 2003). She has published numerous translations of René Daumal, including his major study in Indian Aesthetics, Rasa: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies (New Directions, 1982), and of Henri Michaux (made in collaboration with the author). Over the past several decades she has published over a dozen books of poetry and autobiographical prose, including Avenue A & Ninth Street (Shivastan, 2004), Uvasi & Mohammed (Il Bagatto, 2005), Banana Baby (with facing Italian translations by Alessandro Tuoni, Super Nova, 2006), THE BOOK L (Cool Grove Press, 2010), Love Cantos, 1-5 (Jack In Your Box, 2011), and CRAZY LOUISE, OR CONVERSAZIONE SACRA (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 2017). Her electronic chapbooks are available on the web site Big Bridge. She has also released musical and spoken word recordings, most recently City of Delirium (Sloow Tapes). When not traveling she resides in a tower in Bagnore (Italy), and New York. See less