King of a Hundred Horsemen

by Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker (Translator)

King of a Hundred Horsemen is the first of Marie Étienne’s books to be published in English, and it introduces a major voice in world literature to a new audience. For ten years, Étienne worked as assistant to the experimental French theater director Antoine Vitez, who combined a commitment to the classics with a passionate engagement with socially progressive causes in the years of the student uprisings in France and the Algerian independence movement. Étienne’s poetry has been inspired by this same synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane—the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer’s ongoing the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most “exotic” journeys become ordinary and the most ordinary displacements partake of the strange. King of a Hundred Horsemen —in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series’ first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007—is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 2002

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, this is a difficult book. I've been through it twice now, slowly, and have to admit that much of it is still closed to me. But I am intrigued enough to go back to it.

Etienne is working under that constraints that come with the Oulipo school -- she has chosen a set of arbitrary, almost arithmetic constraints, and has written a rather longish collection (or project) or poetry under those constraints. Here, it's 10 sections of 10 parts each, each part 14 lines; yes, the echo of the sonnet form is intentional, although she is working with lines -- each line ending on a period -- that are of vastly varying lengths, so that some poems seem quite long, and some very short.

Like most modern/contemporary French poets, she is suspicious of narrative, so the reader isn't given that crutch to fall back on. Or not much of one, anyway. There are hints of stories in here. The author's childhood in IndoChina, travels to the States, etc. There are characters that repeat and that get into what seems like a Beckettian dialogue from time to time. There is a mysterious child who reappears at several times. And there are the birds that come back, sometimes very real (observed, even) and sometimes having the magic of myth.

All through there is that suspicion of the art, of the process, of language itself, that seems to overwhelm so much of French letters. "No one writes poetry any long,bric-a-brac in an old hardware store./What credence can be granted to words following each other, how can they still be thought possible?" Which seems kind of despairing. But later on, near the end of the poem, she seems to celebrate what she has accomplished: "I put in every part of my life. I love that."

The times I stopped to look at Hacker's translation, I was very impressed. Sometimes she finds the immediate translation, but when that doesn't work, she moves easily into an idiomatic English that seems right for this poem and a mirror of the French.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

I debated rating this. I am not typically a reader of poetry, of really any I'd say beyond Poe who I enjoy. But I think, even as a rare adventure down the avenue of poems, not rating it would just go against my love for reviewing everything in this world. I can't speak to the technical prowess as I just don't feel educated enough to, but I can prop up the intriguing and odd nature of the story direction. The ending struck me as incredibly odd but then again I may have missed the context leading to it.

[Tiffany Breyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I took myself for an insect, I look at people indirectly, as it were, from the side."

"The head shouts orders while looking at the sky.
The head shouts orders while looking straight ahead."

"- Ah, that ending of day!
'But that ending of day is the beginning of evening.
'I prepare myself to drink, to penetrate the silk of sundown, with a sleeper's slow movements, movements of self-surrounding, or a dream's apparent immobility."

[Bailey :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been extremely interested in the idea of a novel-in-verse as of late, and this book accomplishes that feat of genre spectacularly. Marilyn Hacker is a gifted translator; the curt elegance of Etienne's prose shines through even in English. I love what this book does to conventions of fiction and poetry, alternating fluently between the confessional and the surreal.

[Cynthia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for a reading challenge. It's a collection of poetry (translated from the French).

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book challenging/opaque, but I appreciated the opportunity to try to read the poems in the original French before I looked at Marilyn Hacker's translations on the facing pages. I bought this on a whim at Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco circa 2012, knowing nothing about it, and somehow hadn't read it until now (this is a problem I have: buying books but then reading library books instead of the books I've bought). Anyway: in her introduction Hacker notes that Étienne was born in France and lived in Vietnam as a child, when it was part of French Indochina; some of the poems are set there while others are set elsewhere (there are French coastlines, there are desert sands). The text quotes/alludes to various other texts and writers, though I think the only one I caught without the help of the notes at the end was the slightly modified TS Eliot quote from "Little Gidding" that appears early in this book. I liked certain phrases a lot, like this: "Mémoire lacunaire ou mémoire absolue, je voyage à l'envers pour retrouver la mer." Or this, from Hacker's translation: "Little right-angled streets. Behind closed shutters, the shadows of a party." I also liked the parts of the text that are about writing, that are, as Hacker puts it in her preface, "a philosophical reflection on the direction taken by written texts as they develop." Such as: "The outside appears but chronology, logic, are lacking." Or: "To write only notes, comings and goings of the eye, of memory." Or: "Writing is ridiculous. Whoever writes keeps accounts, of the market, of the month. But not of a life."

[Marilyn]

Marilyn Hacker is one of the most brilliant translators of our time, and the Etienne poems are stunningly good.