In today's post at Poems and Poetics, titled "Abdellatif Laâbi: from Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis" Jerome Rothenberg writes:
That the origins of poetry go back to a poetry of origins is a point often made, not least in musings by the present editor in books like Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, & A Big Jewish Book. If cosmology & cosmogeny, once the domain of poets, are now firmly in the grip of a developed science with a narrative & poetics of its own, there are poets in our time who pursue still vibrant forms of poesis to create new myths of origin, human & cosmic. or barring that, to use parody or collage from older sources as a kind of “transcreation” (H. de Campos) in a mind-enthralling play of origins. Abdellatif Laâbi’s Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis, newly translated & published by Leafe Press in Nottingham, UK, and Claremont, Calfiornia, enters a field inhabited by Blake’s prophetic books, Hugo’s Dieu, Poe's Eureka, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Olson’s Maximus, & Harold de Campos’s Galaxias, among others then as well as now. A heroic figure through years of imprisonment & exile from his native Morocco, Laâbi, as his translators describe his Fragments, carries forward “the plight of the prisoner … one who has been tortured and silenced, who must somehow create hope.” But above all, Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis is “a surrealistic refiguring of Genesis presented in twenty-six fragments … a mystical yet cynical revisioning of both the Old Testament and the Koran.” Or Laâbi himself: “Le cauchemar / Epouse un cercle parfait // Cela se nomme l’éternité // Un bocal hermétique / qu’aucune magie ne peut ouvrir” ("The nightmare / has come full circle // This is what we call eternity // An impenetrable jar / no magic will open"). In 2009 Laâbi was awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize for Poetry.Intriguing, eh? If you have yet to order a copy, one can be yours via Leafe Press or Amazon ... only £8.95/$15.00, which is ridiculously cheap when you consider the going rate for for mystical yet cynical revisionings.
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