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Search - King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems

King of a Hundred Horsemen Poems
Author: Marie Etienne

Marie Étienne’s poetry is inspired by the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane—the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer’s ongoin... more »g preoccupations: the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most “exotic” journeys become ordinary and the most ordinary displacements partake of the strange. King of a Hundred Horsemen—in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series’s first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007—is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet. Marie Étienne is a poet and novelist who lives in Paris, where she is a frequent contributor to literary and book-review journals. Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems and seven published books of translations from the French. Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation King of a Hundred Horsemen is the first of Marie Étienne's books to be published in English, and it introduces a major voice in world literature to a new audience. For ten years, Étienne worked as assistant to the experimental French theater director Antoine Vitez, who combined a commitment to the classics with a passionate engagement with socially progressive causes in the years of the student uprisings in France and the Algerian independence movement. Étienne's poetry has been inspired by this same synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane, the everyday transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. In this book, through a complex but playful reinterpretation of the sonnet form, she moves from the jungles of Indochina to the Atlanta airport, tuning in to writers' voices and painters' visions, in a quest with dream-intensity both through and of our time. King of a Hundred Horsemen—in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series's first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007—is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet. "Odd as it can be, and just that brilliant. I cannot possibly imagine anyone having dared to translate this singularly-angled poem of a startling prose except Marilyn Hacker, whose triumph equals that of the author. Two bravas, please!"—Mary Ann Caws, author of Surprised in Translation and editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry "King of a Hundred Horsemen maintains a steady tone of quiet witness, advancing its own fabulous construction—the book is a series of one hundred sections (section titles themselves included in the count), each section a fourteen-line sonnet in prose—calmly and gracefully . . . King of a Hundred Horsemen itself expands constantly and exponentially, its senses and resonances moving outward and upward not only in translation, but again with the pressure of each reading."—Lindsay Turner, Boston Review

"Marie Étienne, a well-known poet in her home country of France, follows in Perse’s footsteps both formally and in the role of 'guilty conscience.' In her book King of Hundred Horsemen, first published in France in 2002 and now beautifully translated by Marilyn Hacker, Étienne expresses a vast range of experiences and personae, weaving multiple narratives into a whole. Unlike Perse, she is less interested in seeking and mapping herself than in locating idiosyncrasies among the multiplicity of contemporary life. With this approach, Étienne pricks the conscience of her time. Étienne spent the early years of her life in Southeast Asia, in an area that is now part of Vietnam, during the Second World War and the beginning of the region’s struggle for independence. Her memories of the violence and privation of that time and place are vividly represented in King of a Hundred Horsemen by two characters’ experiences, Ang and Lam. These episodes are the most grounded of several narrative lines that run through the work. The others, including glimpses into the journal of a Parisian writer (possibly Étienne herself) and a brief description of a painter, fade in and out of focus, bleeding into one another. Ang and Lam are the only consistent characters in the poem’s shifting narrative landscape. Other characters, some barely hinted at, come across as extraneous to the project as a whole. Étienne manages to keep the poem coherent however, mainly through her adherence to a formal contrivance of her own invention. King of a Hundred Horsemen is composed of nine sections, each section containing ten fourteen-sentence poems. Along with an appendix, the book contains a total of one hundred discrete poems. These numbered 'sonnets' provide the poem with a skeletal structure; without this formal contrivance, the book would fail under the weight of its disparate subjects and multitude of voices. The sonnets themselves are written in a half prose, half verse, just as the book as a whole seems half fiction, half long poem. This modulation is handled well, emphasizing the interpenetration of fiction and life, of interior and exterior. Dream, memory, and imagination are integrated and interpreted through the act of writing, of imposing order. Early on in the book Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva makes an appearance, writing a letter to Boris Pasternak from the seaside. Étienne blurs this scene with one from T.S. Eliot’s 'Marina,' drawing on the poem’s setting and language. Both Marinas lived in exile, and both are associated—in the section of the book titled 'Ocean'—with the inconstancy of the sea. Étienne’s insistence on the fluid nature of identity is countered by her insistence on the abiding presence and importance of the past in the form of memory. As Eliot’s Pericles says in 'Marina' and Étienne echoes, 'What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands/ . . . What images return . . .'"—Clinton Krute, The Brooklyn Rail

"Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Marie Étienne’s eleventh book of poems, King of a Hundred Horsemen, represents an ample first introduction to the work of this restlessly inventive French literary figure . . . Hacker finds in Étienne’s poetry `the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, of the tragic, of the quotidian transformed by the prisms of myth and history.’ This absorbent aspect of Étienne’s sensibility makes it difficult to categorize her style—but perhaps explains why King of a Hundred Horsemen was an attractive assignment for Hacker, a master formalist with a flair for the contemporary . . . In the proper spirit of an experimentalist, Étienne ends her book without clicking it shut. Instead, she implies that through her book she has been `a better singer, a better fighter,’ and so have we. The better singer in King of a Hundred Horsemen is sometimes lovely and lyrical, or surprising and pensive, or blunt and brutal. But perhaps Étienne’s ending is more shapely and traditional than advertised.”—Ron Slate, The Quarterly Conversation "A beautiful, pensive novel-in-verse, King of a Hundred Horsemen presents one of France's most important contemporary writers at her most delicate and most complex. Étienne's integration of autobiography and haunting atmosphere make this not only the portrait of a life, but also that of a world in transition. Translator Marilyn Hacker, herself one of America's foremost poets, has rendered the whole beautifully, keeping all its nuances and sensuality alive."—Cole Swensen, author of Try and Goest "Odd as it can be, and just that brilliant. I cannot possibly imagine anyone having dared to translate this . . . poem of a startling prose except Marilyn Hacker, whose triumph equals that of the author. Two bravas, please!"—Mary Ann Caws, author of Surprised in Translation and editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

ISBN-13: 9780374531928
ISBN-10: 0374531927
Publication Date: 10/27/2009
Pages: 224
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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