Book Description
These poetic prose pieces-neither stories nor essays nor poems-display humor, imagination, and a sense of the absurd to explore a range of topics and ideas. Four great artists are explored in very different ways: an interior monologue by the 17th-century Spanish painter Velázquez as he paints his masterpiece, Las meninas; a longer monologue by 19th-century Spanish painter Goya, spoken to the Duchess of Alba; short views of paintings by Picasso; and a look at the eccentric German collage painter and Dadaist Kurt Schwitters as he collects scraps, clippings, and castoffs. Unique in the approach to the concepts of story and history, these and other short pieces form an avant-garde collage of words and ideas.
About the Author
Saúl Yurkievich is the author of 13 volumes of poetry and 10 volumes of criticism and creative prose. He recently retired as a professor of Latin American studies at the Université de Paris Vincennes and has taught at many leading American universities, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA. Cola Franzen is a translator of Latin American literature into English. Her translation of Jorge Guillén's Horses in the Air won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the Image and the Likeness FROM THE PUBLISHER
In the first half of this creative prose collection, Argentinian writer Saul Yurkievich looks at four great artists in four very different ways: an interior monologue by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Velazquez as he paints his masterpiece Las meninas late in life; a longer monologue by the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Spanish painter Goya, spoken to the duchess he loved, and often painted, upon learning of her death; short views of a series of engravings by Picasso; and a look at the German collagist Kurt Schwitters as he goes about his collection of scraps and castoffs, including the perfect element to complete Construction for Noble Ladies, the work on this book's cover. Since Yurkievich himself is a collagist, working with words and ideas, the Schwitters piece is the book's center. The second half of this book consists of many short pieces that are indescribable as poetry, that simply are. They display Yurkievich's humor and imagination, his sense of the absurd and his way with words. Each is a small delight.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Yurkievich, an Argentinian who has taught Latin American literature in Paris and at several American universities, has written 17 volumes of poetry and nearly as many volumes of criticism. His poems, which paraphrase poorly and are best left to resonate with individual readers, celebrate the inscrutability of life ("I walk across a bridge/ the walls continue/ I can't find/ the center"). Influenced by the early Neruda and by the deconstructionism of Huidobro, he is partial to the primordial implications of sound patterns ("the turbid thundering jumble/ sounds sound amid the uproar"), and he delights in word play ("the hauler hawks/ the hawk hauls"). Yurkievich started out as a painter before embracing literature and claims that his vision does not "come structured as a story." It is thus surprising that In the Image and Likeness features four stories (all about artists) that he calls "figurations." In "About This Painted Dream," we eavesdrop on Velazquez musing about his masterpiece, Las Meninas. In the second figuration, Goya contemplates his passion for the now deceased Duchess of Alba. The third concerns erotic drawings by Picasso, and the last examines Kurt Schwitters assembling a collage. The remaining 20 short pieces in this volume, called "spectacles," are a hodgepodge of the aphoristic ("Every man assumes his correspondence with the world according to his possibilities") and satirical ("I think extraordinary things, but they don't happen"). Yurkevich does magic with the Spanish language, and his translator admirably replicates his virtuosity in English. Recommended for all poetry and Latin American collections.-Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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