New Impressions of Africa

by Raymond Roussel, Mark Ford (Translator)

A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry

Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì―who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era―André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.

Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.

This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

Genres: Poetry, France, Africa, Literature, 20th Century, Nonfiction, French Literature

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Poet, storyteller, playwright and French essayist, born in Paris in 1877 and died in Palermo (Italy) in 1933. Author of a singular literary production of striking originality and dazzling imaginative force, applied with real obsessive fixation experiments applied to descriptive techniques and came to deploy a sort of automatic writing that made him one of the most brilliant of the surrealist movement.

Reviews

[Jim Elkins]

What Does It Mean, Exactly, To Say You've Read This Book?

(This is a first impression of New Impressions. I have a long and hopefully thoughtful assessment here.)

First, I think it must mean that you have already read 'How I Wrote Certain of My Books,' 'Locus Solus,' and 'Impressions of Africa': that is, you are thoroughly immersed, hypnotized, pithed by Roussel's unimpeachable and unapproachable weirdness. Then, I think it should mean you have read something about Roussel: Foucault's book, or possibly Mark Ford's sober appreciation.

But then what can it possibly mean to read a book that keeps opening parentheses (like this ((and then parentheses within those, like this (((or this))) apparently endlessly (((and not at all always rationally ((((or so it seems)))) )))) )) ), playing arcane word games, making unconsciously ridiculous similes, proposing utterly opaque allusions, proposing the reader stop to cut the intentionally uncut octavo pages, and posing book-length puzzles that can never be solved because they aren't even (proper) puzzles. Even that sentence is easiest to read by plowing straight through. If I try to read it according to the order of the parentheses, I need to parse it carefully, and that is at once tedious and nearly always unrewarding.

Here are the two obvious ways that 'New Impressions of Africa' proposes that it be read.

1. Read straight through, including footnotes whenever they appear.
2. Read the way the surrealist's machine for turning the pages of the book supposedly worked: i.e., read to the opening of the first parentheses, find the place where that parenthesis closes, read from there to the end of the canto, return to the opening of the parenthesis, read (skipping interpolated parentheses), etc. -- until you have read the very last quintuple-nested parenthesis.

The first kind of reading cannot yield the sense of any canto, because the logic, the argument -- whatever it should be called -- will be impossible to follow. The second raises two further possibilities:

2a. Read mechanically, assiduously, skipping nothing, but reading in the moment, taking in each new stanza or couplet or page as it presents itself.
2b. Read as you would read a piece of argumentative non-fiction, or a detective story: that is, try to keep the argument, or logic, or story, or grammar in mind as you go.

I propose this last is the real challenge of the book, and I see almost no evidence that critics have tried it: and yet I think the logic and structure of the book itself makes such a reading just barely possible, and therefore necessary.

I claim to have read Canto 2, 'The Battlefield of the Pyramids,' in this way, keeping the logic of the entire canto in mind as I read. It opens with three nested arguments in the space of half a page: a description of a coat (then a parenthesis opens, and inside it begins a description of a scarecrow, as an allegory of faith ((then a double parenthesis opens, and inside it a meditation on the cross apparently begins)) ); the first two arguments end where the parentheses close, on the last page of the canto. It was possible for me, one afternoon, to keep the entire top-heavy, preposterously artificial, tottering, twisted, perverse, inhuman argument in mind at once. At that moment -- which is now long gone -- I felt I had expended the effort Roussel demanded, and found my way to a new kind of rigor. A useless rigor for any other text, of course, but that is as close as I can imagine to what it could mean to say I have read the book.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book soothes me in a very weird way.


* * * * * * * * *


Now here's a book that should have distinct entries here on GR for its two current translations into English - Ian Monk's and Mark Ford's.

Why the more recent Mark Ford version sports blurbs to the effect that his translation is the first is beyond me, though I'm beginnning to suspect some minor conspiracy initiated by distributors of foreign books and their campaign to limit the availability, and perhaps even deny the existence, of Atlas Press editions.

I read Monk's version a couple years ago and it was a revelation that soothed me in a very weird way (see above), and I was content to reread his translation for the remainder of my days. But then out of the blue comes Mark Ford's translation in a conventional looking hardback designed for mass transmission (Monk's version is more of a precious object of publisher's art), and my initial impression was of slackness and dilation as compared to Monk's edgy terseness. This comparatively poor impression was intensified when I actually read the poem's first canto and was continually interrupted in my reading by end notes of often unnecessary explication (I much preferred the purer presentation of Monk's version, being as it is much closer to Roussel's original version, with the onus of understanding placed entirely upon the reader). But then when I read Ford's version of the first canto twice and went back and read Monk's version once, I began to see the benefits of having two very different translations, and presentations, of this great poem; though I was still on the fence about the benefits of Ford's version in isolation.

Ford goes to great lengths to make the poem's syntax and meaning as clear as possible, at the expense of rendering it in any stanzaic uniformity, as Monk does by translating Roussel's rhyming alexandrines as rhyming iambic pentameter.

In my back to back readings of the first cantos of each translation I noticed that Ford's is much more explicit in its expression of Roussel's apparent fecal (or generally excremental, whether solid liquid or gas) preoccupation; a preoccupation I did not even notice until I read Ford's translation.

In the end, or rather in the beginning of the end, as I continue to read this masterpiece in these two versions, I suspect that I will read Ford's much more immediately accessible version as a way to enhance my reading of Monk's denser, prettier, and more mysterious version.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

A truly marvelous artifact from Atlas Press--Oulipian Ian Monk's English translation (the first one!) of this revered (by Surrealists and Oulipians) work tirelessly recreates Roussel's rhyming structure (at the cost of clarity, perhaps?) as it passes within parenthesis within parenthesis within several more layers of parenthesis (the French verse is faithfully reproduced on the left-hand page); interleaved between every page are the slapdash but professional drawings of H.-A. Z0 (who was commissioned anonymously by private detectives hired by Roussel to create 59 drawings based off of brief, seemingly random specifications (also included)); footnotes abound with even more rhymes and parenthesis, elbowing for space on the page and often beating out the poem proper; all of this creating an endless process of flicking back and forth through the pages as the reader tries to connect skeins of thought that were rudely cut off by a stratum of parenthesis (these often pregnant with hundreds of lines of inscrutable lists); even the top edges of each page require the use of that obscure relic known as a letter opener: all of this exactly as Roussel desired back when he unleashed his beast of poesy on an indifferent reading public circa 1932--and I didn't understand any of it at all!

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do I have a favorite poet? No. Do I really enjoy reading poetry that much? No. Do I think Raymond Roussel is a great poet? YES. I might not've answered YES before reading this bk.. but now I'm convinced. I'd previously been very impressed by his "The View" for reasons that're typical of me: THE IDEA OF IT: the idea of writing a long poem based on describing what the author can see reflected in the convex surface of a paperweight. This attn to detail, this amazing focus, this novel formal restriction. But, still, impressed as I was by "The View", it was possible to dismiss it somewhat as not enuf beyond the novelty. Not so w/ "New Impressions of Africa".

I'd been wanting to read this for many a yr. Then I read Eddie Watkins' excellent review & learned from it of the bk's availability. Hence I got it ASAP. But, THEN, I had to READ it.. - & this was a slow process. Anyone knowing that Roussel's "Impressions of Africa" was a novel might expect something entitled "New Impressions of Africa" to be a sequel - &, perhaps in Roussel's mind it was.. but the connection between the 2 wd be highly abstract indeed.

Roussel's writing is procedural, proto-OuLiPoian - formal restrictions channel the content in ways unlikely to be traveled by other means. &, in some cases, this may seem TOO forced. Here, it seems.. 'perfect'. The writing seems to me to be a panoramic view of reality from the perspective of a constantly cross-referencing human encyclopedia. A human encyclopedia w/ a sense of humor, wise, even.

In the main body of the text, after the Introduction, the TOPS of the pages are uncut. Enclosed w/in these sealed sections are deliberately conventional illustrations that Roussel solicited anonymously so that the artist wdn't create them knowing he was doing so for Roussel. The reader is encouraged in the introduction to leave these pages uncut. In the poem on p125 there's this:

"Opening a crib's white drapes, for two uncut
Pages when prised apart; angles that jut"

& then on the following pages (enclosed by their tops uncut) there's Roussel's illustration instruction on the left:

"A man sitting by a table on which a book is positioned
vertically; he is prising apart two uncut pages to read a
passage"

- opposite wch text is an illustration of this. HOWEVER, the illustrator has pictured this so that the man is looking DOWN onto the uncut top rather than into its recess. This seems sloppy to me on the part of the illustrator but perhaps it's not, perhaps the illustrator is showing the uncut fold as part of the content. At any rate, what we have here is a newborn baby of a bk, enclosed in "a crib's white drapes". Roussel has prised apart his mind & loosed language full of surprise & history & PERSONALITY - & this latter is what surprised me the most. Take this passage:

"The prude's eye dodges, for the red behind
Of a whipped rascal; - the bead left behind
On a snapped rosary, for an old convict
Dragging a ball and chain; - a boil when pricked
And liquid flows out; not a water-skin
Pierced basely in the desert; - in a spin,
A masted ship blown whichways in a storm,
For a teetotum, - the red rhomboid form,
Of poison-warning sign's on a flask's label"

Instead of having the content close w/ each rhyme completed, Roussel propels it all forward w/ a sortof restlessness of constant change, a fluidity of meaning that metamorphoses its degrees of viscosity. Bravo!

& the translation by Ian Monk must certainly be highly praised too!!

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all anyone who is interested in 20th century literature should have a copy of this book. Number two, beyond the hype or stories how this book affected the 20th Century and beyond - this is pretty damn great book. Raymond Roussel was one of those guys who had it. And yes extremely wealthy and extremely neurotic - but nevertheless a superb genius.

So what we have is a poetry book that is also probably the most clever "literary" puzzle ever. The translator Mark Ford, who is also the English biographer of M. Roussel did a remarkable and perhaps impossible translation. Yet the popular pop culture of this work comes through and it really lives in the 21st Century. And no, I didn't read the ebook version. i chose this edition because it shows the cover. Now bring me the Broadway version of this poem in book form.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new favorite Roussel

A poem comprised of four long sentences, each extended, broken apart and complicated by a series of parenthetical statements, which have, in turn their own parentheses, and parentheses within parentheses within parentheses, etc. ((((((for example, 6th level parentheses are designated as such)))))) the sentences are also interrupted by various footnotes (all rhymed, reminding us of their unusual place as both part of the poem and also outside the poem-- sometimes the footnotes even complete a rhyme from the body of the poem). The result is frustrating at times, and disorienting always, but also pretty exhilirating... I think of the New Impressions as sharing a history with Tristram Shandy in a literature of interruption.

What relation does this work have, if any, to Roussel's novel, Impressions of Africa? The title seems to designate the work as a sequel of sorts but the connections between the two works are vague at best. Roussel claimed that each line of this poem represented about 15 hours of work (it took him something like 12 years to complete)... He also claimed to have began its composition by writing all the rhymed words down the right side of the pages and then filling in the rest as he went. He also commissioned a series of banal illustrations for the text without allowing the illustrator read the work. What is going on, Roussel?

The poem itself is as amazingly weird as the processes involved in its making-- I like the grotesque bodily imagery throughout the poem-- jaundiced scalps, bloody snot-rags, swollen cheeks, as well as several instances of asparagus pee. It's not quite as otherworldly as Roussel's two novels, but his delirious poetic language is at its height.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry or; poetic exercise exacting damage in revenge, invention by invariably resorting to a doublespeak, triple entendre threatening to take its next level further, bring this familiar home.

Brave, brilliant, barely intelligible and yet; beyond.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique', a title interpreted by Jean Ferry to represent 'nouvelles impressions à fric' ('new imprints for money') -- a sure sign that Raymond Roussel was aware by now that his work didn't sell well and publication had to be paid for by the author himself. The typesetter he collaborated with revealed that Roussel's original intentions with this book were to print the different layers or mental expeditions using different colors, but Roussel couldn't afford the costs of this process. Instead, he released this piece of poetry with a mystifying set of parentheses (that each enclose a tangential line of thought (stacked upon each other like this) or literary play (such as spending 12 pages of text filled with similes and interlocking motifs) in its many satisfying forms when you 'get' the hidden joke) along with extended footnote entries that use the same stacking procedure! It sounds like something that indeed wouldn't sell too well -- but it has become something of a cult classic nonetheless.

The Dutch translation fulfills one wish of Roussel and has printed the different layers with 6 different colors. This helps tremendously in figuring out your position in the work, as the deepest level reads fine, but the others are intermittent and scattered among words and pages that belong to different impressions.

Now I hear you think: "Wait, this is like Inception, right?" And in fact, in the fourth and last canto, a footnote at the 5th level is stacked into 4 sections itself to reach the deepest level of this poem which reads 'De se taire parfois l'occasion est riche' (freely translated: 'Sometimes it is preferable to remain silent'). Although the similarity with the 'limbo' state of Inception is an odd resemblance, the amount of tedious action scenes is far too scarce in this poem to be anything like the aforementioned movie. In this poem we get a non-stop crossfire of rhyming lines, often grouped in pairs of independent 'impressions'. This leads to a wildly encyclopedic range of excursions. It's like a museum that contains all the classy and vulgar things of this world and, moreover, puts them side by side as equals. I could do some philosophizing here about it reflecting life and such, but it really just helps to keep it fresh with hundreds of micro-stories!

Roussel describes humans in detached sketches. He wrote that 'if it resembled [my] reality, it'd failed'. His observations are strictly from the outside - no feelings, little thoughts - and many resemble 'tableaux vivants', living images. They may surely have sprung from his mind or a composing constraint alone, but he makes reflective notes of the ordinary things that give us the 'fire' to act, or that take the fire from our lives.

It is a great, rich and lucid poem full of puzzles, motifs and stories, that you'll read and read again -- if just to understand one piece after being interrupted by five other poems!

[Mahak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't finish it entirely, I guess what excited me at first was the very thing ironically which after a sabbatical made me decide to let it collect dust. Tiresome were the references I continuously had to read since you ought to be thoroughly well-read to fully appreciate the beauty that this book has. You need have patience with this and I'm afraid I exhausted mine especially since there are a ton of books in my unread collection that I would rather devote my time to. I stand by my word of it being one that poets or aspiring poets should read or skim through though. I just had to give it up, I know
I couldn't possibly revisit it so my advice is that you don't let it be, but dedicate yourself to it and finish it without the distractions of other books. Do not put aside for a while. What I've thus far read has been a privilege indeed, I cannot emphasise that enough.

[dimwig · Rating 5 out of 5]

as though joycean stream of consciousness could look back over itself and tie together its loose threads - language (sanity) disintegrates as connotations and associations stretch to infinity - weird feeling (nostalgia almost) of reaching at the end something read at the beginning (to complete original thought, interrupted by hundreds of lines of digressions).

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN HISPERIC MASTERPIECE! This is Roussel's finest work deftly translated: a cascade of verbal images open on on the pages and them close at the conclusion. A dazzling display of Proustian pataphysics that heralds the writings of Robbe-Grillet, Ronald Johnson and many others.

[Ian]

recommended by judd

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably not the best place to start with Roussel, this is my favorite of his books. The translation is a tour-de-force.

Wash your hands before reading --the cream paper retains smudges.