A Certain Plume

by Henri Michaux, Richard Sieburth (Afterword), Richard Sieburth (Translator), Lawrence Durrell (Preface by)

Overview

A bilingual edition of the most famous of Henri Michaux's poetry collections, now in a new translation from the French.

The figure of Plume preoccupied the great Belgian poet Henri Michaux throughout his career. Plume, meaning feather or pen, is a character who drifts from one thing to another, losing shape, taking new forms, at perpetual risk from reality. He is a personification of the imagination as subject to innumerable pratfalls and disgraces, and yet indestructible for all that. In this new bilingual edition, with translations by Richard Sieburth, the entire Plume cycle appears for the first time in English in the form in which Michaux originally published it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372273
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/22/2018
Series:	NYRB Poets Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was born in Namur, Belgium, and educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He contemplated entering the priesthood, turned to medicine, and then, choosing exile instead, enlisted as a seaman in the merchant marine. Michaux’s travels in the Americas and Asia
inspired his travelogues Ecuador (1929) and A Barbarian in Asia (1933), the latter soon translated by Jorge Louis Borges and Sylvia Beach. Eventually settling in Paris in the 1920s, the expatriate Michaux began to write and paint, and his work drew the attention and praise of influential critics, André Gide and Maurice Blanchot among them. In 1948 Michaux’s wife died after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire; devastated, he increasingly devoted himself to distinctive calligraphic drawings. Celebrated around the world for his accomplishments as a writer and artist, Michaux was averse to publicity and public honors and in 1965 refused the French Grand Prix National des Lettres. For many years the only photograph of himself that he allowed to circulate showed his right hand holding a pen over a sheet of paper on a chaotic writing desk.

Richard Sieburth teaches at New York University. His previous versions of Henri Michaux include Emergences/Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke. He has also published translations from the French of Nostradamus, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Gérard de Nerval, Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, and Eugène Guillevic; and from the German of Oswald von Wolkenstein, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. He has, in addition, edited a number of Ezra Pound’s works.

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was a British novelist and travel writer, best known for his Alexandria Quartet.

Table of Contents

Preface Henri Michaux, the Poet of Supreme Solipsism ix

Some Specifics About Fifty-Nine Years of Existence, by H.M xv

A Certain Plume

Part 1

I A Peaceable Man 5

II Plume at the Restaurant 7

III Plume Travels 13

IV In the Apartments of the Queen 17

V The Night of the Bulgarians 23

VI Plume's Vision 33

VII Plume's Finger Was Aching 35

VIII The Yanking Off of Heads 39

IX A Mother of Nine Children! 45

X First Death of Plume 49

XI In Vienna, Second Death of Plume 55

Part 2

XII The Portrait of A 61

XIII Buddha 79

XIV Rupture 81

XV A Singular Thief 83

XVI The Drama of the Constructors 85

Part 3

XVII The Night of Impediments 105

XVIII The Night of Disappearances 109

XIX Confidence 113

XX Birth 115

XXI Moore's Dream 119

XXII Enigma 121

XXIII The Oorooboos 123

Part 4

XXIV Death Song 127

XXV Pate 129

XXVI Movements of Interior Being 143

XXVII Nature 147

XXVIII The Room 151

Part 5

XXIX In the Night 157

XXX At Rest in Misfortune 159

XXXI My Blood 161

XXXII She, the Love Reft from Me 163

XXXIII The Young Budapest Girl 165

XXXIV On the Path of Death 167

Appendix

From Plume, preceded Faraway Within (1938)

Plume in Casablanca 171

The Guest of Honor at the Bren Club 175

Plume on the Ceiling 179

Plume and the Legless Cripples 183

Postface 185

Notes to Poems 197

Translator's Afterword 203

Editorial Reviews

Plume is a modern pilgrim, continually on the quest, in a world which resembles ours but also appears to be the set of a nightmare slapstick. And Plume resembles us as much as he resembles K., Jack Wilton, Charlie Brown, Shuman the Human, the Man Without Qualities, and all those seekers who, when they finally get a chance to address the wise one, are rewarded with a resounding slap in the face.” —Luc Sante

“Monsieur Plume, the sardonic, off-beat, off-center reflection of his author, a character equally indebted to Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka, is back. Sieburth’s stunning translation gets all the subtle humor, all the wacky absurdity, and all the tragicomic pathos of Michaux’s original. An essential moment in absurdist aesthetics and a sheer delight to read.” —Cole Swensen

From the Publisher