11/22: Translating Surrealism with C. Francis Fisher & Alice Yang @ Open Books, 7pm, free

Please join us for a reading of two eminent French Surrealists, Joyce Mansour and Julien Gracq by their translators, C. Francis Fisher and Alice Yang!

The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A. 

"C. Francis Fisher’s translations of Joyce Mansour’s later poems give fresh voice to a fierce, passionate, sensuous, scandalous cry that has strained to be heard in the Anglophone world for over half a century. It’s about time." —Mark Polizzotti

“Alice Yang has beautifully registered the groove and gyre of Gracq’s prose poetry as nobody before.” —Richard Sieburth

 

One of the most important female Surrealist writers, JOYCE MANSOUR (1928–1986) was born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cairo, where Mansour lived until she was forced to emigrate. She settled in Paris in 1953, where she continued writing and became a key member of the postwar Surrealist milieu. Mansour published sixteen books of poetry in her lifetime as well as prose and theater pieces. She died of cancer in Paris in 1986.

 

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared in The Yale Review, the New England Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She received her MFA at Columbia University and has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, and Brooklyn Poets. In the Glittering Maw, published by World Poetry in May 2024, is her first book of translations.

 

 

 

JULIEN GRACQ (1910-2007) was born Louis Poirier. The pen name he eventually adopted is a combination of Julien Sorel, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and the Gracchi brothers of the Roman Republic. A history and geography teacher for much of his life, Gracq published his first book in 1938, The Castle of Argol, which André Breton praised as the first Surrealist novel. In 1951, Gracq won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore, but refused it out of disdain for the literary establishment. He is one of the few writers whose complete works were published during their lifetime by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s most prestigious collection of classic authors. 

 

Alice Yang is a Ph.D. student in the French department at Yale. Her first book of translations, Abounding Freedom by Julien Gracq, was published by World Poetry Books in May 2024.