Let’s Not Hit Each Other is now available from Black Scat Books! This collection by the incomparable Alphonse Allais includes a flying whale, an inflatable colonel, telepathic snails, a summer crime, the insularization of France, missionary parrots, an amphibious herring, twin cousins, and proposals for billboard dogs, deodorized urine, calming the sea with varnish, and crossing […]

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An alphabet that’s both categorical and musical. HORN Alphorn Bullhorn Car Horn Drinking Horn English Horn French Horn Greenhorn Horn Inkhorn Jawhorn Krummhorn Leghorn Matterhorn New Horn Old Horn Pronghorn Quadruple Horn Ramshorn Stinkhorn Tinhorn Überhorn Valve Horn Waldhorn Xanthohorn Yak Horn Zink

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Corinne Taunay’s chapbook Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York, in my translation, is displayed in the window of Les Ateliers du Tayrac in Paris, on the occasion of her show of portraits of artists and writers. It’s small, but you can see it at the bottom of the left window, if you click on […]

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For the first issue of Typo, a stereoscopic word ladder.

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The apparently tireless Norman Conquest (aka Derek Pell) has started a new magazine. It’s called TYPO, which he describes as a “Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, and Constrained Design.” He and Farewell Debut are the editors, and I’m on the masthead for “Special Collections.” I contributed a stereoscopic word ladder, as well as brief articles […]

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In this brief video, Caroline Crépiat describes her book Le Chat Noir Exposed, which I had the honor of translating last year. Watch Caroline! Read her book!

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I had the honor of translating Corinne Taunay’s booklet Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York, now available from Black Scat Books on Amazon. Marcel Duchamp‘s exile in New York, in 1915-1917, brought him sudden fame and changed the course of his career. Corinne Taunay’s lively and witty study describes the scandals of Nude Descending […]

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The new expanded edition of Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! I’ve selected, translated, annotated, and introduced scatological songs, stories, poems, and playlets from some of the most inventive and eccentric writers of the golden age of Parisian Bohemia: Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, Charles Cros, J. Eschbach, […]

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For the upcoming new edition of Merde à la Belle Époque, here’s some early Rimbaud. This poem has been translated before, but this may be the first attempt in rhyming verse. And I was careful to preserve Rimbaud’s alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes as well. THE ACCURSED CHERUB (Arthur Rimbaud, 1871) The roofs are […]

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For a revised and expanded edition of the collection Merde à la Belle Époque, a sonnet by Armand Masson. A rhymed translation like this inevitably requires some paraphrase, but often comes closer to the original poem. Besides, it’s what the poets of 1887 would have expected. THE EYE (Armand Masson, 1887) The eye was in […]

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