Pablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century. What few in the English speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that Andre Breton praised as, "an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before." Similarly struck by the poems' originality, Michel Leiris wrote, "If we must compare him, despite his fierce singularity, in order to try and situate him on the literary map, I see only James Joyce." Near the end of his life, Picasso himself was quoted as having "told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz--Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'" For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, "Picasso's entry into our own time." This is indeed a new Picasso for most of us, or rather, a renewed Picasso: the poems are as protean, erotic, scatological, and experimental in form as his visual art has always been described. But amid the ubiquitous posters, t-shirts, and tchotchkes, how many of us have truly felt the impact of Picasso's visual work as powerfully as it was perceived in the first half of the 20th century? The poems give us a 21st-century Picasso, free of clich . Perhaps they will even spark a revival of interest in his "dabblings."
Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for some forty years now. In 1992 he returned to the Mid-Hudson valley where he teaches poetry & poetics at SUNY-Albany. He has published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations.
In 2008 he published Aljibar II (poems, a bilingual edition with French translation by Eric Sarner, Editions PHI, Luxembourg). Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 came out in late 2009 from SALT in the UK.
His 2007 publications are the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; & Mitch Elrod, guitar) issued by Ta'wil Productions; Aljibar (ibid.) and Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21(Anchorite Press, Albany).
Other recent books include Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999,and A Nomad Poetics (essays), both from Wesleyan University Press. Recent translations include Paul Celan: Selections, and Lightduress by Paul Celan, which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. 4x1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris came out in October 2002 from Inconundrum Press, and Basic Books published his co-translation (with Ann Reid) of Abdelwahab Meddeb's The Malady of Islam in 2003.
With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry. Green Integer published his 3 volumes of translations of Paul Celan: Breathturn, Threadsuns and Lightduress. Other translations include books by Pablo Picasso, Maurice Blanchot, Edmond Jabès, Habib Tengour, Kurt Schwitters and Michel Bulteau into English, and by Carl Solomon, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pete Townsend, Julian Beck and Sam Shepard into French.
