The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis [Paperback]

Jacques Roubaud (Author), Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1995

poetry, tr Rosmarie Waldrop

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writing as a poet-philosopher, Roubaud, who teaches mathematics at University of Paris, casts a delicate net of language to apprehend ideas that most compel him. Here, as in Some Thing Black, he struggles with the premature death of his wife. Attempting to relate in some metaphysical equation the dead with the living, Roubaud posits that there are many, simultaneous worlds (the rather awkward title is based on philosopher David Lewis's book, On the Plurality of Worlds). He tries to place his wife's nothingness within his realm of experience, exploring his own intimate, contradictory states of consciousness-pain, memory, daily routine-and the branching realities they suggest. The poems of the first two selections are filled with play of light and shadows, and define loss as if metered by questions, suppositions and impossibilities. The third section is a long prose poem in which he considers the idea of form as it exists in his own body, in the "grey-in-itself" void of all objects, and in the signficance of an empty notebook. Precisely measured and deeply moving, Roubaud's meditations are rendered in Waldrop's translation with force and nuance.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Ghostly presences inhabit these spaces that these lyric poems and fluid fictions construct. Rosmarie Waldrop's translation brings to the surface the obsessive, repetitive thought patterns that characterize grief. . . . Roubaud . . . asks language to propose equivalencies and transformations." -- Susan Smith Nash, Texture #6

"Highly recommended." -- American Poet Spring 96

"Writing as a poet-philosopher, Roubaud . . . casts a delicate net of language to apprehend ideas that most compel him..." -- Publishers Weekly 2-27-95

Air
Air, Water, Places
Air, Water, Places, Ii
Air, Water, Places, Iii
Alike Up To A Certain Moment, They Diverged
Alive, Absent From All Life
Any, Any Whatever
A Body And Its Shadow Shared A World
Bright World
Clean World, Clean World, Not Deceptive, But Absent
Division Of Worlds
Ersatz-world
Identity
In The Ersatz-world
In These Worlds, In Every One, Beings Forever Without
Ink Simulacrum
It Will Be Objected That Possibly There Is Nothing Rather
Lyrical
Memory
The More-than-world
Plenitude
Preparatory Poem
The Sickness Of The Soul, 5
The Sickness Of The Soul, I
The Sickness Of The Soul, Ii
The Sickness Of The Soul, Iii
The Sickness Of The Soul, Iv
The Sphere
That The World Was There
Transworld
Via Negatgiva: %no Place
Walls, Three O'clock
The Way Of Examples
The Way Of Examples, Ii
The Way Of Stories
The Way Of The Impossible
What To Do With A World
Where Time Imitates A Solid Line, Several Copies
Windowpanes And Gold In Silent Alternation
The World Of Pictions
The World Of Haecceitas
World Of Our Few Years
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 109 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; 1 edition (March 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564780694
• ISBN-13: 978-1564780690
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #48 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Single Authors > Continental European
  • #87 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > French

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Shadows of Logic, March 22, 2006

By 

Erik Duncan (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis (Paperback)

Beautifully discursive and masterfully styled, The Plurality Of Worlds Of Lewis takes David Lewis' turgid, and yet very dry, philosphical treatise on possibility and maps it onto a space convoluted by Roubaud's own pungent sorrow. It is as if the widower has looked at a map, recognized the impossibility of finding his beloved in this mountainous region, and yet, he goes to look, because in the shadows the boundary between searching and finding can be perhaps blurred.