Some Thing Black by Jacques Roubaud, Alix C. Roubaud (Photographer), Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

From the Publisher

In 1983 Jacques Roubaud's wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud--poet, novelist, mathematician--composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud's wife in 1980 entitled "If Some Thing Black."

Times Literary Supplement

This is a harrowing book, about the death of Jacques Roubaud's wife. . . . He has written a thoroughly modern 'love poem.'"

Michael Edwards— Times Literary Supplement

Asylum

No work of recent French poetry, indeed of recent French literature, is more moving than Some Thing Black. . . . [O]ne reads Some Thing Black from the first sentence on with breath withheld, as if one had forgotten (and perhaps one had) that the richest poetry communicates, not only sounds and ideas and images, but also emotions.

Library Journal

While all translation is re-creation, the translation of poetry must convey image, mood, cadence, and concentrated subtlety. In this regard, Waldrop's fine translation is a tribute to Roubaud's rich and often lyrical meditation on death. On the surface these prose poems are an expression of the poet's grief at his wife's premature demise. They are, however, more a bold self-portrait in which the poet exposes his psyche and the struggle he endures to make the language he uses in his craft transcend its inherent limitations. Fine reading for both generalists and scholars of French literature.-- Anthony Caprio, Oglethorpe Univ., Atlanta, Ga.

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