Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond
Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle epoque'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
Dali--who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the
era--Andre 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notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the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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