Roussel

I have often been fascinated by Roussel's book La Vue.  For a while I had a photocopy of the French edition, but I lost it, so I looked and found the only available edition was one translated into Spanish, but still with the French on the left.

This is a long and tedious poems composed in classical alexandrines that describes the content of piece of visual art. There are two others poems in the edition, "La source" and "Le concert" that are exactly the same concept. This book influential in the French Nouveau Roman and in the New York School of Poetry. The surrealists also saw him as a precursor. Foucault wrote a book about Roussel, devoting one chapter to this early phase of his work. I am much less interested in his prose and in this early work and another late poem, "Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique. Of course, there is also "How I wrote certain of my books."

These earlier, descriptive works describe the objects of vision with more detail than would be physically possible. They are thus the zero degree of ecphrasis. They stop time in a kind of eerie way. So one of my sabbatical / viral projects is to read all of this.