The Table by Francis Ponge
The final chapter in Francis Ponge’s interrogation of unassuming objects Written from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge’s interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge’s most personal, overlooked, and—because it was the project he was working on when he died—his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, “durable mother” of the table on and of which he here writes.
The last of Ponge’s published works, and the final volume to receive an English translation, The Table invariably carries the tone of an author returning to the very heart of his vocation through the things that make his utterances possibleIt is his singular achievement to have submerged so fixedly into the world of everyday objects and coaxed from it a new cosmogony of language. -- Erik Morse * The Times Literary Supplement *
A meticulously rigorous translation of a book that adds much to Ponge’s rich body of work. * Kirkus *
A meticulously rigorous translation of a book that adds much to Ponge’s rich body of work. * Kirkus *
Ponge, Francis: - Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was born in Montpellier, France, and is most famously the author of The Voice of Things (1942), Soap (1967), and The Making of the Prairie (1971). During the Second World War, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly newspaper L'Action. He famously countered Surrealism's fixation on the marvelous with a denuded objectivity, and went on to become one of the most influential French poets of the 20th Century. His 1942 book Le parti pris des choses is considered a literary classic. For the last 20 years of his life Ponge was reclusive, living at his country house in Le Bar-sur-Loup, where he died at the age of 89.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781939663245 |
| ISBN 10 | 1939663245 |
| Title | The Table |
| Author | Francis Ponge |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Wakefield Press |
| Year published | 2017-07-06 |
| Number of pages | 104 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |