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 ...
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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also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in near fine jacket. First edition, 2011. Cloth-backed boards in dust jacket, 251 pp., illustrated, clean unmarked text, Near Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket, a bit of waviness to the dust jacket. Dust jacket housed in archival dust jacket protector.
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Seller's Description:
Zo, Henri-A. Fine in Near Fine jacket. Poetry Book is in excellent condition. Binding is solid and square, covers have sharp corners, exterior shows no blemishes, text/interior is clean and free of marking of any kind. Dust jacket shows light shelf wear only, no tears. Text is in English and French. 252 pages with illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
