Steles - Softcover

Segalen, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 2070320707 ISBN 13: 9782070320707

Publisher: Gallimard Education, 1973

Synopsis

Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernism. Trained as a surgeon and Chinese interpreter, he wrote prolifically in a variety of genres. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre--the "stele-poem"--in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here fully translated, in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914. Volume 2 of this work is available online at www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/segalen2 and www.steles.org.

About this title

About the Author:

VICTOR SEGALEN (1878-1919) was a French doctor, novelist, poet, literary theorist, sinologist, and amateur archaeologist.
TIMOTHY BILLINGS is an associate professor of English at Middlebury College.
CHRISTOPHER BUSH teaches comparative literature and humanities at
Princeton University.
HAUN SAUSSY is a professor of comparative literature at Yale University.

Language Notes:

Text: French

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallimard Education
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 2070320707
• ISBN 13: 9782070320707
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160