When Rumer Godden's happy discovery of the Prayers from the Ark occurred, and even when her inspired translations were published in 1962, few suspected that the little book would so soon become a classic, known and loved all over the world. Printing followed printing (up to a total of 75,000 copies in America alone); other translations have already appeared in German, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, Italian; Folways recorded the poems spoken in English and French by Marian Seldes; and a setting to music is on the way.
This second volume is not just an afterthought prompted by the success of the first—the decision to translate two separate groups was made at the beginning. Nor is the second group just "more of the same." As Rumer Godden says in her introduction,
Most of these new poems are not prayers, in the sense that a prayer is a plea: each animal, bird, fish, reptile, or insect voice makes, as it were, a statement of its situation, its circumstances, what, perhaps, we humans would call its problem.
This new menagerie includes twenty-five engaging, assertive, sly, or self-deprecating of God's creatures, among them the Lion, the Centipede, the Toad, the Gnat, the Gazelle, the Starfish, the Peacock, and the Oyster. whatever its personal tone of voice, each poem is"as lovely as a snowflake in the sun"—as Fanny Butcher said of the others. No one who loved Prayers from the Ark can fail to be enchanted by this companion volume, again delightfully decorated with Jean Primrose's delicate drawings.
—from the dust jacket
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