King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems (National Poetry Series Books) [Hardcover]

Marie Etienne (Author), Marilyn Hacker (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2008 | Series: National Poetry Series Books

King of a Hundred Horsemen is the first of Marie Étienne’s books to be published in English, and it introduces a major voice in world literature to a new audience. For ten years, Étienne worked as assistant to the experimental French theater director Antoine Vitez, who combined a commitment to the classics with a passionate engagement with socially progressive causes in the years of the student uprisings in France and the Algerian independence movement. Étienne’s poetry has been inspired by this same synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane—the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer’s ongoing preoccupations: the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most “exotic” journeys become ordinary and the most ordinary displacements partake of the strange. King of a Hundred Horsemen—in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series’ first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007—is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Not previously available in English, Étienne’s work is well known in France, where she is a prominent contributor to literary life as both a poet and a novelist. Brought up in what was then French Indochina and is now Vietnam, she remains deeply connected to the Southeast Asian culture that nourished her, and as deeply affected, or afflicted, by memories of the wars she lived through as a soldier’s child. She defies easy geographical categorization, and in this book she writes in an ambiguous genre poised between poetry and prose that reads as much like a surreal novel as a book of prose poems. Vaguely defined characters appear and disappear. Pastiches of other writers’ work alternates with the pseudo-diary of an unknown narrator. Translator Hacker, who won the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series for this book, calls it a mosaic of shattered mirrors. Hypnotic and elusive, Étienne’s words and images embed themselves in memory. --Patricia Monaghan

Review

“A beautiful, pensive novel-in-verse, King of a Hundred Horsemen presents one of France’s most important contemporary writers at her most delicate and most complex. Étienne’s integration of autobiography and haunting atmosphere make this not only the portrait of a life, but also that of a world in transition. Translator Marilyn Hacker, herself one of America’s foremost poets, has rendered the whole beautifully, keeping all its nuances and sensuality alive.” —Cole Swensen

 

“Odd as it can be, and just that brilliant. I cannot possibly imagine anyone having dared to translate this singularly-angled poem of a startling prose except Marilyn Hacker, whose triumph equals that of the author. Two bravas, please!” —Mary Ann Caws, author of Surprised in Translation and editor of The Yale Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374181187
• ISBN-13: 978-0374181185
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,978,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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