Collected French Translations: Prose

Description

John Ashbery is known as America's foremost poet, but his prose writing and his engagement with prose writers - through translations, essays and criticism - have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book, the companion volume to Collected French Translations: Poetry, presents his version of the classic French fairytale 'The White Cat' by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, alongside works by innovative masters such as Raymond Roussel and Giorgio de Chirico. Here are Roussel's Documents to Serve as an Outline and extracts from his Impressions of Africa; selections from Georges Bataille's darkly erotic novella L'Abbe C; Antonin Artaud's correspondence with Jacques Riviere; Salvador Dali on Willem de Kooning; Jacques Dupin on Alberto Giacometti; and key theoretical texts by Odilon Redon and others. Several of these twenty-eight prose pieces, by seventeen writers, artists, musicians and critics, are previously unpublished or have been long unavailable. Many, such as Pierre Reverdy's Haunted House, are modern classics. This book provides new insight into the range of French cultural influences on John Ashbery's life and work in literature and the arts.

John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, most recently Quick Question (January 2013). He is the recipient of many honours, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur 'genius' award. Born in Rochester, New York, he was educated at Harvard and Columbia. In 1955 he went to France on a Fulbright Scholarship and spent much of the next decade there, including several years as art critic of the International Herald Tribune and Paris correspondent of ArtNews magazine. Ashbery's research on the life and works of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) resulted in several groundbreaking articles, as well as the appearance in print of the first unpublished work of the writer to come to light after his death. His translations include works by Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Stephane Mallarme, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and many others. His 2008 translation of Pierre Martory's The Landscapist was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. The French government has appointed Ashbery as both Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Officier of the Legion d'Honneur.