Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess
enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1[zasłonięte]877-19) was one of the
French belle époque's most compelling literary figures.
During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously
championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the
widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New
Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most
extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this
weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status,
and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì--who dubbed
it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era--André
Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault,
Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began
writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while
serving in the French Army during the First World War
and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard
to believe the immense amount of time composition of
this kind of verse requires," he later commented.
Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both
rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly
one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century
modernism. This bilingual edition of New
Impressions of Africa presents the original French
text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic
translation on facing pages. It also includes an
introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and
evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical
references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously
commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from
Henri-A. Zo.
|
|