Fibrils by Michel Leiris
A major publishing event: the third volume of Michel Leiris's renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time in a brilliant translation by Lydia Davis
“There is no better translator than Lydia Davis, who has not only rendered in its necessarily complex light this infinitely important text of autobiographical-reflective thoughts and counterthoughts, but provided a sumptuous and clarifying introduction to its elegant author”—Mary Ann Caws, editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry
“Fibrilles, the French title of volume three of Leiris’s autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, has exactly the same connotations as its English cognate, Fibrils: small fibers or, in botany, the ultimate subdivisions of a plant root—which Leiris here punningly entwines with all the ‘febrile’ filaments of terror or hallucination that striate the natural history of his mind. Throughout her translation, Lydia Davis pays minute attention to the adventitious rhizomes of Leiris’s sentences, which move forward by ever moving laterally, disclosing the self by an endless process of subterranean deferral. Davis has now been transplanting Leiris into English for a quarter of a century: her craft as a translator shows in her own writing, as it does here on every page.”—Richard Sieburth
“Fibrilles, the French title of volume three of Leiris’s autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, has exactly the same connotations as its English cognate, Fibrils: small fibers or, in botany, the ultimate subdivisions of a plant root—which Leiris here punningly entwines with all the ‘febrile’ filaments of terror or hallucination that striate the natural history of his mind. Throughout her translation, Lydia Davis pays minute attention to the adventitious rhizomes of Leiris’s sentences, which move forward by ever moving laterally, disclosing the self by an endless process of subterranean deferral. Davis has now been transplanting Leiris into English for a quarter of a century: her craft as a translator shows in her own writing, as it does here on every page.”—Richard Sieburth
Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a profoundly influential and versatile French intellectual and the author of Manhood and Phantom Africa. His four-volume autobiographical essay The Rules of the Game serves as a primary document of artistic life in the twentieth century. Lydia Davis has received numerous awards as a translator of works from the French and as the author of the bestselling fiction collections Collected Stories and Can’t and Won’t.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780300212396 |
| ISBN 10 | 0300212399 |
| Title | Fibrils |
| Author | Michel Leiris |
| Series | The Margellos World Republic Of Letters |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Yale University Press |
| Year published | 2017-05-02 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |