Mezza Voce

By Anne-Marie Albiach

Translated by Joseph Simas

Out of Print

Details
Publisher
The Post-Apollo Press
Original Language(s)
French
Additional Credits
Cover art by Etel Adnan
Design by Simone Fattal
Genre(s)
Poetry, Translation
Edition, Year
First Edition, 1988
ISBN
978-0942996111
Pages
164
Format
Paperback
Availability
Out of Print

Mezza Voce, in its American-English translation, is the fruit of nearly four years labor by Joseph Simas in collaboration with the author, Anthony Barnett, Lydia Davis, and Douglas Oliver. The task of the translator, here, has been to enact the original French in an ongoing practice of writing in English—an enactment that both precedes and mirrors the words that finally extend the life of the original into another language.

— from the Translator’s Note

Anne-Marie Albiach
Anne-Marie Albiach (1937-2012) was a French poet and translator. With Claude Royet-Journoud and Michel Couturier, she co-edited the magazine Siécle a mains, where she first published her translation of Louis Zukofsky's "A-9.” Her English ... Read More
Joseph Simas
Joseph Simas is the translator of Mezza Voce, by Anne-Marie Albiach. Read More

Praise for Mezza Voce

If we can imagine the words themselves finding voice, becoming the persons of the poem, then perhaps we can begin to appreciate Albiach’s accomplishment. Mezza Voce represents a true theatre of the page, the realization of one of this century’s grand designs, desires in language “taking their place.” 

— Michael Palmer

“I live the text as a body,” says Anne-Marie Albiach. She lives it literally, in the physical context of breath, of voice, of syntax as a physical next-to-each-other of words broken off by silence, the edges rough, giving off sparks like live wires. She lives it also as the enigma of desire, the “inexhausible novel” of drive and impulse. Her words are “engendered” by coupling words, and song becomes blaze, or “incantescence.” It’s high time that this important French poet is published in English.

— Rosmarie Waldrop

After living with the original French versions of these poems for many years, I was astonished to see how closely the translations by Joseph Simas and his collaborators capture the spirit of Anne-Marie Albiach’s work: its tone, its intensity, its brilliance. There is no other poetry like this in the world. Even at its most difficult, its passions are mesmerizing. It is a great triumph to have carried these extraordinary pages into the English language.

— Paul Auster

Here is the poet for whom the voice itself rings in its silent echo, reaching ever farther into the constancy of reflection, ever further into something unknown, unknowable, frightening…

— Gale Nelson, Cathay

It is a book of fourteen poems… which seem to be a meditation on an already-distanced interior drama, a kind of passion both in the sensual and in the suffering senses.

— Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temblor

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