The Tablets I-Xxvi

by Armand Schwerner

Laborious fraudulent reconstruction of fictional Sumero-Akkadian a tour de force of experimental visual poetry. Atlas Press have an amazing line in reprints of classic work from the surrealists, dadaists and other art movements. Strange and wonderful works!

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Armand Schwerner was an avant-garde Jewish-American poet. His most famous work, Tablets, is a series of poems which claim to be reconstructions of ancient Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions, complete with lacunae and "untranslatable" words.
Schwerner was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and his family moved to the United States when he was nine years old. He attended Columbia University (B.A. 1950, M.A. 1964) and taught at universities in the New York City area until his retirement in 1998.

Reviews

[Dead · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad's father wrote this.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great unacknowledged masterpieces of late-20th C literature.

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empty holes in the fish-dying-becoming directions.

[Colin Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is such a pleasure. Presented as a faux-scholarly translation of an ancient text, there’s as much poetry in the “translations” as the scholarly apparatus that surrounds them. I most loved the humorous contrast between the analytical, dry scholar and these effusive poems about sex, food, the divine.

[Will Lashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schwerner's supposed "reconstruction" of 27 Sumero-Akkadian inscriptions grounds the avant garde eclecticism of Ezra Pound, John Cage and the Beats in the archaic crypto-mystical veils of Bronze Age mythology, with nods to Sappho, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament and the hermeneutic tradition.