A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry
Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel
(1877-1933) 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literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations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.
