Collected French Translations

Prose

Ashbery John

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Several of these twenty-eight prose pieces, by seventeen writers, artists, musicians and critics, are previously unpublished or have been long unavailable.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.

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, beginning in 1953 with "Turandot and Other Poems". In 1976, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. His art writings are collected in "Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987" (Carcanet, 1990) and his literary essays appear in the "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Other Traditions" (Harvard University Press, 2000), and in "Selected Prose" (Carcanet, 2004). Widely honoured internationally, he is the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry from theBavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Munich), the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), and the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poesie (Brussels), all given for lifetime achievement. In 2002 he was named Officier of the Legion d'Honneur of the Republic of France. In 2012 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal, presented to him by President Obama at the White House. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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