Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique suivies de L’Ame de Victor Hugo

Roussel, Raymond; Henri Zo (Illustrated by). Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique suivies de L’Ame de Victor Hugo. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963. Reprint. Octavo. 171, [5]pp. Original printed wrappers. Title page in red and black lettering. Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque’s most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel’s work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. “Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique” (New Impressions of Africa) is undoubtedly Roussel’s most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì – who dubbed it the most “ungraspably poetic” work of the era – André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. “It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires,” he later commented. “Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique” is made up of four cantos, each of which begins by establishing the setting in Egypt and then interrupting itself with a parenthetical thought. This thought is in turn interrupted by another, until we are faced with layer upon layer of parentheses. The poem, in its original French, is written in rhyming alexandrine (twelve-syllable) couplets alternating between masculine and feminine rhymes. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. Raymond Roussel approached the commercial lillustrator Henri Zo to produce a set of fifty nine illustrations to accompany his poem. The contact was made through a detective agency to conceal the author’s identity and intent. The images were printed so as to be visible only when the pages were cut, and bore little relevance to the text itself. All the 59 illustrations are present at the end of the text. Starting on page 123 is Raymond Roussel’s original poem “L’Ame de Victor Hugo” with the brief explanation that, one night, the poet had dreamt that he saw Victor Hugo writing at his work table and that the poem which follows was what he read when he looked over Victor Hugo’s shoulder. Spine slightly discolored and partly creased, with minor rubbing along edges. Upper corner of very last pages creased. Text in French. Wrappers and interior in overall good+ condition. g+. Softcover. (38202) $45