Poetry
2009 • 72 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-934200-02-5
La Presse
PURCHASE:
Small Press Distribution
Bookshop.org
This closely-woven enactment of the history of the philosophic discourse on light—its nature, its potential, its raison d’être—creates an oneiric meditation that traces the connection of beauty to thought. Strongly atmospheric, crystalically distilled, Roubaud’s text takes one of the most charged poetic metaphors and returns it to the material world, no less charged.
Exchanges on Light
Jacques Roubaud
Translated from the French by Eleni Sikelianos
JACQUES ROUBAUD
Jacques Roubaud is one of France’s leading contemporary writers. Working in poetry, fiction, essay, and theater, his voice ranges from crisp analysis to dashing humor to delicate and anchored emotion. A prominent member of the Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature), he taught mathematics for many years at the Université de Paris X. He has also published critical works on the alexandrine and on the troubadour poets as well as an examination of contemporary poetry, Poésie, etcetera: ménage, which is available in an English translation by Guy Bennett from Green Integer Books. Roubaud is also a prolific translator from Japanese and English, including such classics as Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. His work has been widely translated, and many of his books, including The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, and The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart are available in English through Dalkey Archive Press. A book-length critical analysis of his work, Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory by Jean-Jacques Poucel, is available from the University of North Carolina Press.
REVIEWS
"Six voices dialogue across centuries. Their delightful—and delightfully translated—exchanges range through philosophers, poets, and scientists as far apart as Aristotle and Lord Kelvin. As the voices follow each other in sestinalike permutation, they encircle—now by propositions, now by poems—'the sum of light [that] is the world'" —Rosmarie Waldrop
EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
The Form of the Poem
or
Game with Light
Houses along the edge of the road, empty; nothing on the road; no one.
I to 0 light.
A lit window, only one; its rectangle.
I all.
Night, and silence; and silence; silence.
2-I light.
Rain stopped, no rain; wind died down, no wind.
3-I.
Stars out, one after the other; no stars.
4-I.
A lit window, only one, rectangle; the same rectangle.
4-2.
Houses and nothing; behind, nothing; above, nothing; nothing.
5-2.
A lit window, the only one; in the window’s rectangle, a shape begins.
5-3.
Window dark
blown out.
game.