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Recumbents
Wesleyan Poetry Series
Translated by Wilson Baldridge
Sales Date: 2005-03-28
268 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
A widely acclaimed collection by one of France's leading poets and thinkers. Bilingual—first English translation.
Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (2006)
Winner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work (2006)
Hailed as one of France's most influential living poets, Michel Deguy has remained largely inaccessible to English-language readers. Recumbents is the first English translation of the most critically-acclaimed volume of this poet's work. The word recumbents refers to funereal sculptures (gisants), reclining lovers, and the literal imprint of those and other figures on the page. The collection includes a poem for the dead, "Procession," written by Deguy in the wake of his father's suicide, and poems dedicated to all phases of Eros. These are interwoven with passages on rhetoric or what Deguy calls poetic reason. This bilingual edition also includes a meditation on Deguy's work by deconstructionism's foundational thinker, Jacques Derrida.
RELAY
Sibyllaries
THE SEINE WAS GREEN BY YOUR ARM
Object Complements (December)
Use Covered Yard (March)
Cardiogram (May)
To Put Back into Prose (July)
Now you shall see...
PROJECT FOR A BOOK OF RECUMBENTS
Ingredients
Perpetual Motion
The Narrations
Recumbents
Recumbents
The Narration
Manufacture
Aphrodite Colleague
A Question for the Poem
Dedication
The Letters
Recumbents
RELATIONS
An Incidental Tale
May Day
Procession
Civil List
Space
ERASURE
Dedication
Recumbents
Didactics
Edges
Form
OE
Where Time Gets Lost
Recumbents
Truths
Dialogues
Catachreses
Translation
At sunrise I arose...
On the Secret
Truths
Recumbents
Devotion
Erasure
Withdrawal
Didactics
Alarm
MEASURES FOR MEASURE
Our Dwelling
Measures for Measure
Nude
Everything washes away...
The Cella Was Empty
JOURNAL OF THE POEM
Threshhold Pleasures
That Which Assembles Prepares Resemblance
Dovetail
Compareason
Communing Character
The Hop-Scoth Principle
To re-inter-est
To be free
An die Musik
Rhetoric
Combat
Rhetoric Again
The Spirit of Poetry
Likenings
Memorandum
JACQUES DERRIDA: How to Name
MICHEL DEGUY is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis). He has been awarded two of the most important French poetry awards, the Prix Mallarmé and Le Grand Prix National de Poésie. WILSON BALDRIDGE, a widely published translator, is Associate Professor of French at Wichita State University. JACQUES DERRIDA is a celebrated French philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the late 20th century.
"Possibly the single most outstanding volume by Deguy to date—in Recumbents he is working at the top of his poetic powers."
~Pierre Joris, author of A Nomad Poetics
"How gratifying to read Baldridge's translation of Michel Deguy's Gisants! One could not have hoped for a more sure-footed, attentive, and refined rendering of Deguy's exacting poetry."
~Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck,Professor of French, Vassar College
"Possibly the single most outstanding volume by Deguy to date—in Recumbents he is working at the top of his poetic powers."
~Pierre Joris, author of A Nomad Poetics