Cantio Nocturna Peregrini Aviumque is an unusual book... Subtitled A Puzzle in eight languages, it is a truly polyglot labyrinth, but if most readers are bound to wander astray in it - a wanderer's nightsong indeed - at least they are getting lost in a funhouse... Adam Makkai's project raises a host of questions about the degrees and concepts of textual relationships, (particularly) intertextuality... Goethe's presence is strongly felt throughout the book, and if it is Goethe's last breath whispering through the forest his dying words "More light", Makkai has in a sense translated them as "more languages", which is quite in keeping with Goethe's notion of "world literature". Makkai's work could be compared to Rainer Schulte's recent Comparative Respectives: Anthology of Multiple Translations... The nocturnal wanderer who has managed to find a way out of Makkai's fascinating jungle, will also most certainly want to feel the breeze of the Faroe islands...

Astradur Eysteinsson
University of Iceland
& University of Iowa

 It takes a major act of daring to choose Goethe as one's co-author... Adam Makkai, the poet-linguist, carries it off by building original poetic texts of the "deconstructed" elements of the most famous Goethe poem... Makkai is a poet-theoretician, who shows that all languages have a different persona, but the cognizant individual remains paradoxically the same while journeying throughout all of them... The result is linguistic poetry and poetical linguistics... Is he playing or is he deadly serious? Is his search for humanity's "arche-poem" pointing the way to an "arche-language"? The reader will have to decide.

István Fried
(Winner of the Herder Prize)
Attila József University of Szeged