Description
Poetry. Translated by Laura Marris and Rosmarie Waldrop. TRISTE TRISTAN quilts the early medieval versions by Thomas of Britain and Béroul together with a demythologizing perspective that "takes down the pants of the lyrical tradition." Other poems take us on walks through Brittany and drives through North Carolina that fuse landscape, language, history, and memory into a complex space in motion. While Keineg's work began tonally between song and angry scream these more recent poems give a larger place to humor and irony as well as to a more nuanced, polysemous language. which has been nourished by his living in between Breton, French, and English. When "all languages are always foreign" it is impossible to have a naive, unreflected relation to any one of them—or to their literatures.
Author Bio
Paol Keineg (born in 1944 in Brittany) is the author of about 20 books of poetry and plays. He was fired from his first teaching job for his separatist Breton activism. In the mid 1970s he moved to California where he first worked as a welder. Then went to graduate school at Brown University (PhD 1981) and taught French and literature at Dartmouth, Brown, and Duke Universities. In 2009 he returned to his native Brittany. He is the father of the singer Katell Keineg.
Author City: USA
Rosmarie Waldrop's recent books of poetry include Driven to Abstraction, Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (New Directions), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her novels, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All, are available from Northwestern UP, her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), from University of Alabama Press, the memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, from Wesleyan UP. She translates German and French poetry (Elke Erb, Friederike Mayröcker, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud) and co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop, in Providence, RI.
Author City: PROVIDENCE, RI USA