Wood asleep: Bois dormant

by Gérard Macé, David Kelley, Timothy Mathews

French-English bilingual edition. Gerard Mace's work challenges the barriers between poetry and the essay. This play between and within genres is essential to his writing - which has been called essay merveilleux - and derives from a questioning of language in its broadest sense. He is equally interested in the seductive musicality of words and in the remembered gestures which traced the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the calligraphic writing of the Far East. His fascination with dictionaries, grammars and glossaries leads him off on journeys in which the real and the imaginary are fused, but without being confused. He slips between words like a marvelling child constantly hoping that one day the world might be read like an open book. This edition brings together three series of prose poems, Le Jardin des langues (1974), Le balcon de Babel (1977) and Bois dormant (1983). Other books by Mace have as their subject literary figures such as Rimbaud, Corbiere, Nerval and Champollion, while Rome et le firmament and Lecon de chinois evoke places heavily charged with culture and history. Mace's other books include Vies anterieures (1991), which takes up the relationship between memory and writing, in the form of Lives (as in the Lives of saints or illustrious men), and La memoire aime chasser dans le noir (1993), which develops his fascination with the image - the poetic image, dream image and photographic image. Following the sudden death of translator David Kelley, work on his translation of Gerard Mace's book had to be completed by series editors Timothy Mathews and Michael Worton, helped by Jean Khalfa. Jean-Pierre Richard is one of Europe's foremost literary critics. He has written not only on French poets but also on Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust. He has a wide following throughout Europe and the USA, and is admired particularly for his approachable and sensuous accounts of French writers.

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Gérard Macé est né en 1946 à Paris. Aux éditions Gallimard (collection « Le Chemin », puis collection « Le Promeneur »), il a publié depuis 1974 des proses narratives et poétiques, comme Bois dormant, Le dernier des Égyptiens, la série intitulée Colportage, mais aussi des poèmes et, plus récemment, plusieurs volumes de Pensées simples.
À l’image poétique, il ajoute l’image photographique à partir de 1997, comme en témoignent La photographie sans appareil, Mirages et solitudes, Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle ou La couleur est un trompe-l'œil, tous parus aux éditions Le Temps qu’il fait.
Il a été surnommé « écrivain-colporteur » dans numéro spécial de Critique qui lui a été consacré en 2019.

Grand prix de Poésie de l'Académie française (2008)