What do you think?
Rate this book
4X1: Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour
4 X 1 is as puzzling as it is compelling. Noted editor and translator Pierre Joris brings together four seemingly disparate authors, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tristan Tzara, Jean-Pierre Duprey and Habib Tengour, forming a book of poems, prose-poems, semi-autobiographical prose, and poetic narratives. It is not an anthology, it is not a collected translations, it has roots in no particular literary movement or idea. The only obvious binding factor is presented in the title: that these four works share a single translator.
The out-of-the-ordinary seems to be the overriding theme. Even readers familiar with the two well-known authors, Rilke and Tzara, will not find what they expect. Rilke, perhaps Europe's most famous modernist poet, noted for his Elegies and his posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet, is here represented by a long prose work, "Testament." Tzara, one of the core founders of Dadaism, who wrote the first Dada texts along with the famed Seven Dada Manifestos, is shown through the lens of his complete ethnopoetic work, poems that resonate with the sounds of Africa, Australia and the Pacific.
Duprey and Tengour are virtual unknowns to readers in English. Duprey, a late French Surrealist, gained repute early in his short life for his dark, foreboding imagery and recognition by such luminaries as André Breton, who wrote, "You certainly are a great poet, doubled by someone who intrigues me. Your light is extraordinary." Duprey's prose-poems in 4 X 1 are dreamscapes of intricate language, filled with fantastic creatures of shadowy nightmares. Tengour, the only of the four still alive, has emerged over the years as one of Algeria's most forceful and visionary francophone poetic voices of the post-colonial era. The selection here is a re-imagination "through contemporary Maghrebian characters in their Occidental exile in Paris the story of that most famous Arab triumvirate of Omar Khayyam, Hassan as-Sabbah and Nizam al-Mulk."
However, as the book proceeds from Tzara to Rilke to Duprey to Tengour, the works cast a strange light on the authors' respective literary movements. These works, which have never before been translated into English, subtly alter our understanding of Dadaism, Modernism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. And even more strangely, when the book is taken as a whole, common themes emerge and demand to be recognized.
Each work is full of estrangement, dehiscence, mental and physical expulsion; each breaks with psychic and national boundaries, exploding and spilling into the others. Rilke becomes Dadaist, Tzara almost Postmodern, and Duprey's surrealism slides into Tengour's Arabian consciousness. Through mutual exile and displacement, the book takes us on a geographic and spiritual excursion through the extraordinary. As Joris remarks in his introduction, fitting the four authors together "was like tracing a weirdly exemplary, if abbreviated, poetic map of the 20th century. . . a psycho-topography that leads from matters involving late 19th century colonialism all the way through the long and torturous 20th century to leave us exactly there where we have to imagine a new cultural constellation."
4 X 1 invites the reader to discover a different sort of book, a collection of different writings in known and unknown spaces, that cannot help but move the reader toward an image of the twentieth century organized without boundaries.
The out-of-the-ordinary seems to be the overriding theme. Even readers familiar with the two well-known authors, Rilke and Tzara, will not find what they expect. Rilke, perhaps Europe's most famous modernist poet, noted for his Elegies and his posthumously published Letters to a Young Poet, is here represented by a long prose work, "Testament." Tzara, one of the core founders of Dadaism, who wrote the first Dada texts along with the famed Seven Dada Manifestos, is shown through the lens of his complete ethnopoetic work, poems that resonate with the sounds of Africa, Australia and the Pacific.
Duprey and Tengour are virtual unknowns to readers in English. Duprey, a late French Surrealist, gained repute early in his short life for his dark, foreboding imagery and recognition by such luminaries as André Breton, who wrote, "You certainly are a great poet, doubled by someone who intrigues me. Your light is extraordinary." Duprey's prose-poems in 4 X 1 are dreamscapes of intricate language, filled with fantastic creatures of shadowy nightmares. Tengour, the only of the four still alive, has emerged over the years as one of Algeria's most forceful and visionary francophone poetic voices of the post-colonial era. The selection here is a re-imagination "through contemporary Maghrebian characters in their Occidental exile in Paris the story of that most famous Arab triumvirate of Omar Khayyam, Hassan as-Sabbah and Nizam al-Mulk."
However, as the book proceeds from Tzara to Rilke to Duprey to Tengour, the works cast a strange light on the authors' respective literary movements. These works, which have never before been translated into English, subtly alter our understanding of Dadaism, Modernism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. And even more strangely, when the book is taken as a whole, common themes emerge and demand to be recognized.
Each work is full of estrangement, dehiscence, mental and physical expulsion; each breaks with psychic and national boundaries, exploding and spilling into the others. Rilke becomes Dadaist, Tzara almost Postmodern, and Duprey's surrealism slides into Tengour's Arabian consciousness. Through mutual exile and displacement, the book takes us on a geographic and spiritual excursion through the extraordinary. As Joris remarks in his introduction, fitting the four authors together "was like tracing a weirdly exemplary, if abbreviated, poetic map of the 20th century. . . a psycho-topography that leads from matters involving late 19th century colonialism all the way through the long and torturous 20th century to leave us exactly there where we have to imagine a new cultural constellation."
4 X 1 invites the reader to discover a different sort of book, a collection of different writings in known and unknown spaces, that cannot help but move the reader toward an image of the twentieth century organized without boundaries.
- GenresPoetry
206 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
49 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Joris
76 books68 followersPierre Joris was a Luxembourgish-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 2015–2021) and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) and The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia (not so) Deserta (essays on Maghrebi and Mashreqi literature and culture). His other recent books include: A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with P. Cockelbergh and J.Newberger, CMP, 2020); Adonis and Pierre Joris, Conversations in the Pyrenees (CMP 2018); Stations d'al-Hallaj (translated by Habib Tengour; Apic Editions, Algiers, 2018); The Book of U (poems, 2017, Editions Simoncini, Luxembourg). His translation of Egyptian poet Safaa Fathy's Revolution Goes Through Walls came out in 2018 from SplitLevel. In June 2016 the Théatre National du Luxembourg produced his play The Agony of I.B. (published by Editions PHI). His earlier publications include: An American Suite (early poems; inpatient press 2016); Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 (Black Widow Press 2014); Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG 2014); A Voice full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly (co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh; 2014, Contra Mundum Press) and The University of California Book of North African Literature (volume 4 in the Poems for the Millennium series, coedited with Habib Tengour, 2012).
In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris' work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff and Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).
Other books include The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (Stanford U.P. 2011), Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, (poems, 2010), Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 (Salt Books), Aljibar I & II (poems) and the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta'wil Productions). Further translations include Paul Celan: Selections (UC Press) and Lightduress by Paul Celan which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.
In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris' work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff and Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).
Other books include The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (Stanford U.P. 2011), Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, (poems, 2010), Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 (Salt Books), Aljibar I & II (poems) and the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta'wil Productions). Further translations include Paul Celan: Selections (UC Press) and Lightduress by Paul Celan which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.