Description
Poetry. Translated by Eric Fishman and Hoyt Rogers. For English-speaking readers, the pieces in OUTSIDE expand the access to du Bouchet offered by Openwork, the selection published by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers in 2014; deliberately, none of those texts is repeated here. Like the earlier volume, OUTSIDE affords a cross-section of du Bouchet's vast and highly varied work: from the dreamlike landscapes of his youthful poems to the mineral shards of his later compositions, which waver between poetry and prose. Even more than Openwork, OUTSIDE places a particular emphasis on the lyrical fragments from du Bouchet's notebooks. All the texts in this new collection follow the chronological order of their original publication—or in the case of the notebook entries, their date of composition—and all have been rendered into English for the first time. Du Bouchet's oeuvre is immense, and much of it still remains untranslated."—Eric Fishman from his introduction
"In a typically taut yet open-ended design—as much visual as verbal—du Bouchet draws together the principal threads of his lifelong quest for truth, no matter how daunting that truth may be. The paradox of poetry is that unless it ceases to speak, the fecund silence toward which it tends cannot enter into play: the poet cannot go 'outside without having stopped it.' What he was seeking reemerges as the world itself, the crushing 'avalanche of air' that takes his breath away. He hangs up his vain attempt to approach it like a hollow pelt; language, which seemed so 'rapid,' is now the 'motionless animal of words.' The poem is always a betrayal of nature, a kind of taxidermy. But innate to the ceaseless hunt for meaning is the wildness that escapes us. Killing the vital language we love, freezing it into the trophies we call poems, we arrive at an inkling of what awaits us beyond them. We have gained what far surpasses any Romantic reverie: reality itself."—Hoyt Rogers from the afterword
Author Bio
André du Bouchet (1924-2001) is recognized as one of the greatest French authors of the twentieth century. A groundbreaking poet, he was also a prolific translator from the English, German, and Russian, as well as a noted critic of art and literature. He published nearly seventy books in all. These include scores of volumes of verse and lyric prose, numerous works on Giacometti and other artists, along with translations of Faulkner, Shakespeare, Joyce, Hölderlin, Riding, and Pasternak. In the late sixties he co-founded-with Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Paul Celan, and others—the influential literary journal L'Éphémère. Among many honors, he was awarded the National Poetry Prize of France in 1983.
Author City: TRUINAS FRA
Eric Fishman is an educator, writer, and translator. He studied English literature and translation at Yale, and French literature at the University of Paris. He is currently translating a collection of poetry by Monchoachi, one of the major contemporary poets of Martinique. Along with other editors, he recently founded a magazine of poetry and art by young people.
Author City: JAMAICA PLAIN, MA USA
Hoyt Rogers is a writer and translator. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of periodicals. He translates from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish; he has translated books by Bonnefoy and Borges, among many other authors. With Paul Auster, he published Openwork, the first anthology of du Bouchet in English.
Author City: SANTO DOMINGO DOM