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Cover credits:
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Winner of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize for contemporary poetry in translation, selected and with an introduction by Susan Stewart
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Price: $16.00 USD
“Eléna Rivera’s translation of
Bernard Noël’s The Rest of the Voyage is
at once original and remarkably faithful—indeed, its originality lies in the
care and music the translator has brought to her commitment to follow Noë
l’s
forms as closely as possible. Rivera succeeds beautifully in setting the
rhythms of the French original into English. The succession of poems has a
fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is
remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the
effect as she follows the speed and light of Noë
l’s themes. Those themes are no
less than a meditation on the traveler’s encounter with landscape in the late
twentieth century. Noë
l is one of the most distinguished living writers in
France. Yet Rivera’s is the first translation of his poetry into English and
her work thus remedies an unfortunate weakness in English-language letters.”
—from the Introduction by Susan Stewart
“At last, the
uncanny brilliance of Bernard Noë
l in a striking English translation attentive
to the rhythms, Noë
l’s impulsive catlike jabs, and sound patterns of the
French. In Eléna Rivera’s translation, Noë
l’s poems evoke place as the event of
the present in all its palimpsestic fullness. Knowing that time is where
‘language is swept up and blown away,’ Noë
l anchors his faith in now, in its
lists, fragmented sketches and koans, in its endlessly opening doors, its libraries
in ashes, and, significantly, in the body itself, which we discover, he writes,
as a form of the incompleteness of the present. With unstoppable energy, its
poems saturated in acetylcholine, The
Rest of the Voyage lights up our ongoing moment in the blurred panorama of
our lives.”
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