Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Yes, he was an eccentric genius. And we just love him. Pardon me if i send a flippant (and okay, weak) review for the uninitiated:
Can we, by chance (and here one wonders in chancy prose ((never poetry, as the unlucky literary aspirant attempts to deflect (((although in deflecting , the glint reflects))) meaning from form)) whether the poet is oft misunderstood), ever find ourselves in flight from art?
Ach...
he had time, space and money to create his works - each publication different in style and form. So have many people, but they didn't produce works like this, in obsessive intensity.
Mark Ford has done a fine fine job here. This complex work has been lucidly transliterated, and finely organised, considering the structure of the work is as important(?) as the writing.
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Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle poque'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 Dal--who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era--Andr 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also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
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