Alcaeus in Santorini

Copies of the Poems & Fragments of Alcaeus, translated into English by the poet and novelist R J Dent, and published by Circaidy Gregory Press, are now available to buy at Atlantis Books in Santorini.

Atlantis Books is a truly amazing bookshop. It’s on the Main Marble Road in Oia, Santorini. Inside, it’s a bibliophile’s treasure-trove.

Alcaeus’s Poems & Fragments has made its way across the world and onto a shelf of Greek poetry and literature in Atlantis Books. It’s almost as though Alcaeus has gone home.

Here’s Alcaeus alongside Philip Sherrard, Dionysios Solōmos, Arthur Machen, Homer, and other distinguished Greek and Anglo-Greek authors and scholars.

Atlantis Books in Oia, Santorini, is one of the bibliophile wonders of the world. There is no other bookshop quite like it.

It’s fitting that Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments is now available to lovers of Greek poetry and Greek literature – on a Greek island as beautiful as Santorini, and in a bookshop as unique as Atlantis Books.

Atlantis Books, Main Marble Road, Oia, Santorini, Cyclades, Greece.

http://www.atlantisbooks.org/

 

Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments, translated into English by R J Dent.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcaeus-Fragments-R-J-Dent/dp/1906451532/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

 

Circaidy Gregory Press, Hastings, Sussex, UK.

http://www.circaidygregory.co.uk/

 

R J Dent

www.rjdent.com

 

The Songs of Maldoror

The Songs of Maldoror

by Le Comte de Lautréamont

Translated by R J Dent

Illustrated by Salvador Dalí

Foreword by Paul Éluard

Lautréamont’s Biography by Jeremy Reed

Introduction by Candice Black

264 pages, 22 half-tones, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Series: Solar Books – Solar Nocturnal

Paper $16.95

ISBN: 9780982046487

 

‘A new, definitive edition of Lautréamont’s influential masterpiece. Vividly translated by R J Dent.’

 

‘Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldoror [is] the black bible… almost the basic dream text of surrealism.’ J G Ballard

 

‘The Songs of Maldoror is an enigma of redoubtable power.’ Jacques Derrida

 

The Songs of Maldoror is ‘the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.’ André Breton

 

 

Le Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse (1846–70), a Uruguayan-born French writer and poet whose only surviving major work of fiction, The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), was discovered by the Surrealists, who hailed the work as a dark progenitor of their movement. It was in The Songs of Maldoror that André Breton discovered the phrase that would come to represent the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance: “as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table.”

 

Le Comte de Lautréamont

 

Artists inspired by Lautréamont include Man Ray, René Magritte, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and, in particular, Salvador Dalí, who in 1933 produced an entire series of illustrations for The Songs of Maldoror. Twenty of those illustrations are included, for the first time, in this new, definitive edition of Lautréamont’s influential masterpiece. Vividly translated by R J Dent – the first new translation for over thirty years – this edition also includes a foreword by French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and a concise biography of the author by poet Jeremy Reed. In addition, an introduction by series editor Candice Black details the links between Maldoror and the Surrealist movement.

 

The Songs of Maldoror is a poetic novel (or a long prose poem) consisting of six cantos. It was written between 1868 and 1869 by Le Comte de Lautréamont, the pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse. During the early 1900s, many of the surrealists (Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Max Ernst) cited the novel as a major inspiration to their own works. The Songs of Maldoror – and the book’s protagonist Maldoror – have continued to fascinate readers since its publication.

 

Here is a short promotional film of an extract from The Songs of Maldoror.

 

 

The film was made by Duncan Reekie. Details of Duncan’s work can be found at: http://www.duncanreekie.co.uk/

 

Here’s The Sunday Times‘ review of The Songs of Maldoror:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_

and_entertainment/the_tls/article7164138.ece

Here’s The Independent‘s review of The Songs of Maldoror:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-les-chants-de-maldoror-by-the-comte-de-lautramont-1632973.html

 

The Songs of Maldoror can be ordered from The University of Chicago Press at:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=bio&isbn=9780982046487

or from Amazon.co.uk at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Songs-Maldoror-Solar-Books-Nocturnal/dp/0982046480/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289177923&sr=1-1

or from Amazon.com at:

http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Maldoror-Solar-Books-Nocturnal/dp/0982046480/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3

 

 or from Solar Books at:

http://www.solarbooks.org/solar-titles/maldoror.html

Details of The Songs of Maldoror and R J Dent’s other books can be found at:

www.rjdent.com

Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil & Artificial Paradise

by Charles Baudelaire

Translated by R J Dent

Here’s R J Dent’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. It was published by Solar Books on January 9th 2009. According to the blurb it’s ‘a brand new translation that vividly brings Baudelaire’s masterpiece to life for the new millennium’.

R J Dent says: ‘This particular translation was a labour of love; it started years ago, when I studied Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal as an undergraduate and realised how inaccurate the available translations were. I promptly set about translating twenty or so of the best poems, particularly the banned ones. In the process, I very quickly came to admire Charles Baudelaire’s poetic voice. It was refined and dignified, and yet very daring. I now understand these contradictions, if that’s what they are.’

‘I found the translation process itself very interesting. Because Baudelaire’s writing is very visual, it was almost like time-travel; I wandered around 19th century Paris, absorbing the sights, sounds, scents; was taken into the bedrooms of many dusky women, all of them sprawled across their beds, dressed only in jewels and perfume.’

‘When I had finished the translation, I was back in the 21st century. I couldn’t wait to get back to Baudelaire’s Paris. The translation process itself was very much like archaeology. I had the French text and I would work at it steadily, uncovering its buried English meaning, word by word, line by line, until finally, the whole poem would stand naked before me in all its pristine glory. That’s Baudelaire’s poetry for you. If only all translation work was like that.’

‘Incidentally, I very much enjoyed translating the introductory essay by Guillaume Apollinaire, which is now available in English for the first time.’

‘Solar Books has done a great job with The Flowers of Evil. With it they’ve included a new version of Artificial Paradise, which is a series of Baudelaire’s reflections on wine, hashish and opium.’

Odilon Redon’s cover picture, which he painted specifically for The Flowers of Evil, perfectly captures the zeitgeist of Baudelaire’s 19th century Paris.

The Flowers of Evil & Artificial Paradise

Charles Baudelaire

Translated by R J Dent

SOLAR BOOKS

ISBN-10: 0-9799847-7-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-9799847-7-8

Publication date: January 2009

The Flowers of Evil can be ordered from Solar Books at:

http://www.solarbooks.org/solar-titles/flowersofevil.html

or from The University of Chicago Press at:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=10734555

or from Amazon.com at:

http://www.amazon.com/Flowers-Artificial-Paradise-Solar-Nocturnal/dp/0979984777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236890663&sr=8-1

or from Amazon.co.uk at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flowers-Artificial-Paradise-Solar-Nocturnal/dp/0979984777/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217774414&sr=1-1

Details of this book and R J Dent’s other works can be found at:

www.rjdent.com

Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me

What the Water Gave Me is Pascale Petit’s most recent poetry collection.

The collection is subtitled Poems after Frida Kahlo, and as such, What the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. All of the poems are based on Frida Kahlo’s paintings or drawings; some of the poems are literary interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Pascale Petit draws on her training and experience as a visual artist to create alternative word ‘paintings’.

Far more than a mere verse biography, What the Water Gave Me is a vibrant poetry collection which explores how Frida Kahlo transformed and transmuted the trauma of a near-fatal bus accident into personal, but always universal, art. Pascale Petit, with her feel for nature, her understanding of pain and redemption, and her vivid and colourful style (she was once described as ‘Sylvia Plath on acid’) fully inhabits Frida Kahlo’s turbulent world.

In a poem at the beginning of the collection, Pascale Petit sets out her unflinching agenda:

What the Water Gave Me (1)

I am what the water gave me,

a smoke-ring in a jar,

the braided rope

my ladder to the light,

my shivering bird-heart

caught,

my mouth a bubble

of not-yet-breath,

while in my nuclei

two spirals dance,

my budding body sheathed in pearl

as I learn,

even before birth,

to doodle in the dark.

© Pascale Petit (2010)

It’s right there in those words: ‘as I learn… to doodle in the dark’ that Ms Petit manages to catch the unmistakable voice of Frida Kahlo; a voice that can be heard in every poem in this collection. And it’s that kind of scrupulous attention to detail that makes this such a vivid, painful, powerful, vibrant, colourful, and explosive collection of beautifully-crafted poems.

Pascale Petit has commented on What the Water Gave Me:

‘The poems in What the Water Gave Me are spoken in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and bear the titles of her paintings. A few sequences, such as the title poem, represent one painting over several poems and are woven through the collection. Some poems keep quite close to the paintings, while others are versions or parallels. I have concentrated on the main events of Kahlo’s life in chronological order: her polio as a child, the near-fatal bus accident she suffered as a teenager which left her in constant pain for the rest of her life, her tempestuous marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera whom she loved but referred to as her second accident, his infidelities, her miscarriages, the many surgical procedures she underwent, her vivacity and love of nature and ideas about the interconnectedness of living things, and most of all, how she turned to painting as recompense for her suffering.  However, this book is not a comprehensive verse biography and some aspects of her life are not included, mainly because I wished to focus on how she used art to withstand and transform pain.’

Others have also commented on What the Water Gave Me:

“Petit’s collection is a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo’s life and work. ‘And this is how I started painting. / Time stretched out its spectrum / and screeched its brakes.’ WH Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, tells the Irish poet: ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.’ Petit’s collection, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.” Ruth Padel The Guardian 12 June 2010

’Their apparent shared sensibility makes the ventriloquism of these poems entirely unforced, and while Kahlo’s voice is subtly distinguished from Petit’s own, both women have a way of taking painful, private experiences and transmuting them, through imagery, into something that has the power of folklore…They capture the unsettling spirit of Frida Kahlo and her work perfectly.’ Poetry London

’A dazzling and kaleidoscopic look at one of the greatest artists in the world, by Pascale Petit, who is a truly remarkable poet.’ Amazon.co.uk

’In What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit, the poet has achieved far more than a biography of Kahlo through verse. The combination of historical details and poetry in this collection is unique…’ The Black Sheep

Ultimately, What the Water Gave Me is a very powerful and important poetry collection. In a number of ways it’s as powerful and as important as her 2001 collection, The Zoo Father.

Pascale Petit’s website can be found here:

http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk/index.php?f=data_poetry_collections&a=0

and her blog can be found here:

http://www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com/

and What the Water Gave Me can be found here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1854115154?tag=paspetsblo-21&camp=2902&creative=19466&linkCode=as4&creative

ASIN=1854115154&adid=0GTH70PX2DQ7S0ST9HQH&

Try What the Water Gave Me. Read it. Then read it again. It’s the best poetry collection published so far this year.

What the Water Gave Me

by Pascale Petit

ISBN: 9781854115157

Seren Books

www.rjdent.com

Charles Baudelaire’s The Abyss

Here’s Charles Baudelaire’s The Abyss.

Charles Baudelaire's The Abyss translated by R J Dent

The poem is from R J Dent’s translation of The Flowers of Evil, published by Solar Books.

Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil translated by R J Dent

Details can be found here: http://www.solarbooks.org/solar-titles/flowersofevil.html

The Abyss has been set to music by the Finnish composer/musician Outi Tarkiainen.

The first performance of The Abyss was in Helsinki in September 2009.

Here’s the video clip:

Translation © R J Dent 2009/Music © Outi Tarkiainen 2009

And here are the lyrics:

Pascal had his abyss that followed him.

Everything is abyss: action, desire, dream – word.

I feel the wind of fear pass frequently

through my thick hair, which often stands on end,

up and down, everywhere, into the depths,

through silence, space, captivating, ugly…

During my nights, a god with clever hands

draws never-ending multi-shaped nightmares

and I’m afraid of sleep – it’s a big hole

full of horrors that lead to the unknown.

Windows show me infinity. Seeing

it, my hurt mind suffers from vertigo.

How I envy the sense of nothingness;

I’m never free of numbers or of beings.

Translation © R J Dent (2009)

www.rjdent.com

Charles Baudelaire’s The Albatross

Charles Baudelaire's The Albatross translated by R J Dent

Here’s Charles Baudelaire’s The Albatross.

The poem is from R J Dent’s translation of The Flowers of Evil, published by Solar Books.

The Flowers of Evil & Artificial Paradise by Charles Baudelaire translated by R J Dent

More details can be found here: http://www.solarbooks.org/solar-titles/flowersofevil.html

The Albatross has been set to music by the Finnish composer/musician Outi Tarkiainen.

The first performance was in Helsinki in September 2009.

Here’s the video clip:

Translation © R J Dent 2009/Music © Outi Tarkiainen 2009

And here are the lyrics:

The Albatross

Often, for amusement, the sailing crew

catch that bird of the seas – the albatross;

companion on our voyage, it follows

the ship as it slides through the sea’s abyss.

When this once-great sky king has been dumped,

awkward and ashamed, onto the ship’s boards,

it pitifully drags its great white wings

along its feathered sides like useless oars.

This graceful voyager through shades of blue,

once beautiful, is now clumsy and weak;

one sailor mocks the cripple who once flew,

another stubs a pipe out on its beak.

The poet is just like this prince of clouds;

beyond range, above storms – these are his haunts;

exiled on Earth amidst a jeering crowd,

his giant wings won’t permit him to walk.

Translation © R J Dent (2009)

www.rjdent.com

Frida Kahlo’s art

Here are some paintings and drawings by Frida Kahlo.

What the Water Gave Me

My Birth

Suckle

She Plays Alone

Memory

Roots

The Bus

Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

Remembrance of an Open Wound

Flower of Life

The Henry Ford Hospital

Pitahayas

Moses

A Few Small Nips

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale

The Wounded Deer

My Dress Hangs There

The Broken Column

Self-Portrait with Monkeys

Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot

The Wounded Table

Diego on my Mind

Diego and I

Prickly Pears

Diego on my Mind

Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair

Fruit of Life

Two Nudes in the Forest

The Two Fridas

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Senor Xolotl

Tree of Hope, Stand Fast

Portrait of Mariana Morillo Safa

The Dream

The Plane Crash

Fruits of the Earth

Self-Portrait with Monkey

Sun and Life

Still Life

Without Hope

Living Nature

Self-Portrait with Dog and Sun

There is a very good online resource of all of Frida Kahlo’s paintings and drawings. It’s at:

http://www.fridakahlofans.com/mainmenu.html

The Wikipedia entry for Frida Kahlo is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo

and details of Pascale Petit’s stunning Frida Kahlo-inspired poetry collection, What the Water Gave Me can be found here:

http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk/index.php?f=data_poetry_collections&a=0

I’ll simply let Frida Kahlo’s art speak for itself.

http://www.rjdent.com

http://rjdent.wordpress.com/

Salvador Dali’s Art

Salvador Dali

Here are some paintings by Salvador Dalí – an artist whose work I admire very much.

Soft Construction With Boiled Beans

 

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

 

Reflections of Elephants

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work.

The Hallucinogenic Toreador

His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

 

Cannibalism in Autumn

His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931.

The Persistance of Memory

Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

Dalí attributed his ‘love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes’ to a self-styled ‘Arab lineage’ claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

The Madonna of Port Lligat

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behaviour, in order to draw attention to himself.

The Last Supper

His eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Tentation

Dalí’s artwork is highly original, technically brilliant and wonderfully surreal.

Woman at the Window

If you enjoy Dalí’s art as much as I do…

Young Girl Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity

then here’s a link to some of his art:

http://www.dali-gallery.com/posters/index.htm

Enjoy.

www.rjdent.com

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

The Garden of Earthly Delights (or The Millennium) is a triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). The painting has been housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. Dating between 1503 and 1504, when Bosch was about 50 years old, it is his best-known and most ambitious work.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

The triptych is painted in oil and comprises a square middle panel flanked by two rectangular wings that can close over the centre as shutters. The three scenes of the triptych are probably intended to be read chronologically from left to right.

The left panel depicts God presenting to Adam the newly created Eve:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (left panel)

The central panel is a broad panorama of sexually engaged nude figures, fantastical animals, oversized fruit and hybrid stone formations:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (centre panel)

The right panel is a hellscape and portrays the torments of damnation:

The Garden of Earthly Delights (right panel)

Art historians and critics frequently interpret the painting as a didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations. However the intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries. 20th and 21st-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych’s central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost.

www.rjdent.com

Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzisław Beksiński

Zdzisław Beksiński (24 February 1929 – 21 February 2005) was a renowned Polish painter, photographer and sculptor.

He is best known now as a fantasy artist.

Beksiński executed his paintings and drawings either in what he called a ‘Baroque’ or a ‘Gothic’ manner.

Zdzisław Beksiński’s first artistic style was dominated by representation.

The best-known examples of this style come from his ‘fantastic realism’ period.

This was when he painted disturbing images of a surrealistic, post-apocalyptic environment.

Beksiński’s  style is abstract, being dominated by form, as is typified by his later paintings.

Zdzisław Beksiński was murdered in 2005.

www.rjdent.com