Mark Polizzotti joins us to present his new translation and edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s selected writings, “The Drunken Boat” (out now in a bilingual edition from NYRB Poets) in conversation with Chris Clarke. This virtual event, brought to you as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): https://www.communitybookstore.net/book/9781681376509
About the book:
Poet, prodigy, precursor, punk: the short, precocious, uncompromisingly rebellious career of the poet Arthur Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, John Ashbery, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith.
In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers authoritative and inspired new versions of Rimbaud’s major poems and letters, including generous selection of “Illuminations” and the entirety of his lacerating confession “A Season in Hell”—capturing as never before not only the meaning but also the daredevil attitudes and incantatory rhythms that make Rimbaud’s works among the most perpetually modern of his or any other generation.
About our guests:
Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and the author of eleven books, including “Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto.” His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
Chris Clarke is a scholar and literary translator currently living in Philadelphia. His book-length translations include work by Raymond Queneau, Pierre Mac Orlan, Éric Chevillard, and Ryad Girod, among others. He was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives,” a prize for which he was also a finalist in 2017 for his translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s “In the Café of Lost Youth.” Chris is a founding co-editor of the online translation journal Hopscotch Translation.
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