How I Became One of the Invisible, new edition (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) - Softcover

Rattray, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635900727 ISBN 13: 9781635900729

Publisher: Semiotext(e), 2019

Synopsis

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition.

In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever.
―from How I Became One of the Invisible

Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers.

Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.”

Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

About this title

About the Author

David Rattray (1946–1993) was a poet, translator and scholar, fluent in most Western languages, Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. He translated the works of Antonin Artaud, René Crevel, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, among others.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

Review

David Rattray was a terrific writer, just not read enough. How I Became One Of The Invisible is a collection of classic essays of preoccupations and musing and information and experience ... a beautiful book.

―Robert Creeley

Fantastic and calm stowaway information ... a charge of true love.

―Thurston Moore

...the willful wasting of scholarship, artistic, personal identity in getting to other places ... the application of dangerously close friendships, drugs, literature and music to these travels  This book is a pilgrimage to unlit flows.

―Jim Fletcher, Chemical Imbalance, New York

Edition details

• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1635900727
• ISBN 13: 9781635900729
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 424
• Editor: Kraus Chris