Description
Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the French by Aditi Machado. "In lines so lush they verge on grotesque, the body and its beauty are rendered by Farid Tali. As 'render' means to depict but also separate flesh from its bone, so too does this elegiac novel dismantle the barriers of memory, romanticism, and predetermination to illuminate the ragged beauty of a body in transition out of itself and into what is void. Is death beautiful? If beauty rages, shocks, evanesces, then it must be. Aditi Machado makes a stark, dark French into tight, lean English, taut as a string that when plucked must sing. A brief novel that only seems to drift lightly like a musical air; in reality it will settle down heavy in your bones and haunt you a long, long time." —Kazim Ali
"Out of the decaying body, Farid Tali has wrought song. Every sentence surprises, adding up to an exquisite book unlike any other." —Maggie Nelson"PROSOPOPOEIA reverberates with a sadness that is quiet, detached and stark...Here, Tali transforms the violent excess of his earlier ruminations into a more fully realized testament to the human body." —Abby Burns
Author Bio
Farid Tali was born in 1977. A French writer of Moroccan descent, his first book was a journal written in collaboration with Renaud Camus. It was called Incomparable (1999). His first solo work Prosopopée was published by Éditions P.O.L in 2001. Salim Jay, in his Dictionnaire des écrivains marocains [Dictionary of Moroccan Writers], writes that "on reading Tali, one thinks of those words by Nietzsche in Humain, trop humain: '…and life, at the very least, was not invented by morality…'" This is Tali's first appearance in the English language.
Author City: FRA
Aditi Machado is an Indian poet and translator. Her first book of poems, SOME BEHEADINGS, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2017. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Route: Marienbad (Further Other Book Works, 2016) and The Robing of the Bride (Dzanc Books, 2013). She edits poetry in translation for Asymptote.
Author City: USA