New impressions of Africa Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
New impressions of Africa = Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique
（Facing pages）
Princeton University Press, 2011
- Other Title
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Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique
Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique
- Uniform Title
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Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique
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Note
French with English translation on facing pages
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1 Canto I: Damiette: La maison o? Saint Louis fut prisonnier / Damietta: The house where Saint Louis was held prisoner 18 Canto II: Le Champ de bataille des Pyramides / The Battlefield of the Pyramids 62 Canto III: La Colonne qui, l?ch?e jusqu?? ce que la langue saigne, gu?rit la jaunisse / The column that, when licked until the tongue bleeds, cures jaundice 178 Canto IV: Les Jardins de Rosette vus d?une dahabieh / The Gardens of Rosetta seen from a dahabieh 210
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