Recovery - Softcover

Broqua, Vincent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 191534106X ISBN 13: 9781915341068

Publisher: Pamenar Press, 2022

Synopsis

RECOVERY is an exhibition, an inquiry, a translative text. It seeks to vivify experience through a politics of gayness and an active demonstration of queerness. It engages with, in Marcel Mauss's term, "techniques of the body," from discrete gestures to athletic maneuvers and intimate caresses. By exploring weakness, it reshapes everyday actions and words into poetic acts of recovery. The book begins in the diverse: RECOVERY is comprised of tracks (as in skiing, as in DJ-ing, as in walking) that readers are free to mix, to dance on, or to roam around in. Its prose, its poetry, its essays, and its translations are like method air. As in skateboarding, you are alone on your board, you ride the curbs, you jump the obstacles, you alley-oops (from the French "allez hop"), or you do darkslides, and yet you are never alone; you are doing it with other skateboarders. A painter painting alone in front of a cave looks like one of the rocks; onomatopoeias seem universal, but are not; a poem in Persian gets translated into a collaboration. RECOVERY was published originally in France as Récupérer. This English edition, translated by Cole Swensen and augmented by texts written directly in English by the author and collaborators, has been transformed to adapt to this new context.

"If jouissance didn't exist, Vincent Broqua would have invented it. As it is, Broqua recoups joyance and gayety for poetry and translation. Pardon my French, but I gotta say: this is a pataqe(e)rical extravagance that you--that we--comment dit-on?--can't afford to decline. Cole Swensen has recovered the original so we can now, at long last, read Broqua as what's been missing from American poetry." --Charles Bernstein

"Translator Cole Swensen gives us a treat: poet Vincent Broqua's RECOVERY is lovely cacaphony, transeuphoric languagings and projectural extrapolations on translation, verse, speech, leaping and hovering in the space between languages, refusing what is monolingual in both cultures. Swensen at times turns French into American by leaving it in French (or did she write French in French!), so as to beckon back to English. Broqua is never one voice, she seems to tell us. And he invites collaborators many, via translation and intranslatables, from Charles Bernstein to Ghazal Mosadeq; even dogs bark differently here between tongues they or we cannot master. In Broqua's brocante, poetry is electricity, translation makes mixity multiply. Each page is alive with jumps and sparks!"--Erín Moure

Poetry. Essay.

About this title

About the Authors

Vincent Broqua is a writer and translator. He and his heteronyms work with text, video and narrative as ways of entering the diverse, that special place between the unnamed and the named. He writes in French and English. He teaches in the MA in Literary Creation at Paris 8, where he is a professor in North American Arts and literature. In 2000, he co-created the collective Double Change, and in 2010 he co-founded the multilingual journal Quaderna. With Abigail Lang and Olivier Brossard, he is also the co-curator of the Poets and Critics series. His book Photocall, projet d'attendrissement (Les petits matins, 2021 -- Prix du roman gay 2021 mention poésie) was awarded the 2021 Prize for gay novel/poetry in France. His work has appeared in The Chicago Review, Jacket, Jacket2, How2, READ, Place, and more. His other poetry publications include: La langue du garçon (Al dante/ Presses du réel, 2023), Frais du jour (L'Ours Blanc, 2020), Récupérer (Les petits matins, 2015), même = same (Contrat Maint, 2013), Given (roman pour s.) (Contrat Maint, 2009).

Cole Swensen is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, including Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021), On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat, 2015), Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012), STELE (Post-Apollo Press, 2012), and Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She has also translated over a dozen books of poetry into English from French, by poets such as Suzanne Doppelt, Pierre Alferi, Nicolas Pesquès, Olivier Cadiot, Pascalle Monnier, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Her translation of LAZY SUZIE by Suzanne Doppelt (Litmus Press, 2015) was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and her translation of Island of the Dead by Jean Frémon (Green Integer, 2002) won the PEN USA Award for Literary Translation. In 2009, Swensen coedited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. A book of her essays on poetry, Noise That Stays Noise, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011. She is currently a professor in the literary arts program at Brown University and founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to the translation and publication in English of contemporary French poetry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pamenar Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 191534106X
• ISBN 13: 9781915341068
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284