Fortino Samano

Jen-Luc Nancy author Virginie Lalucq author Cynthia Hogue translator Sylvain Gallais translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Omnidawn Publishing

Published:1st Oct '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Fortino Samano cover

Fortino Sámano (the overflowing of the poem), translated by Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais, with French on facing pages, is a collaborative work by the emerging French poet, Virginie Lalucq, and the distinguished philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Lalucq wrote the serial poem, Fortino Sámano, after seeing an exhibit of photographs on the Mexican Revolution by Agustin Victor Casasola. Her series is a meditation on the single, extant photograph of Sámano, a Zapatista lieutenant and counterfeiter, which Casasola snapped as Sámano, smoking a last cigar, appeared to stare death nonchalantly in the face moments before his execution by firing squad (it was reported that he himself gave the order to fire). Little is known about Sámano, and Lalucq's poem makes no attempt to be biographical or historical. Rather, she treats the image itself, the fact that the camera caught the image of life just prior to its end. What, then, does the image represent? She asks. Nancy's section, Les débordements du poème (The overflowing of the poem), is a series of poetic commentaries on each of the poems in Lalucq's series. It is a philosophical contemplation of the specific poem, Fortino Sámano, and also, a poetic investigation of the lyric genre, which works hand-in-hand with Lalucq's poems. Fortino Sámano is an exciting poetic dialogue, and a significant work in poetics, which Hogue and Gallais have brought into English.

"We all know that the reader collaborates in the text. Here, a reader was given the chance to articulate his reading, which in turn changed the poem. The roles of poet and philosopher seem almost reversed: the poem's language is plain, stripped down, and engages philosophical questions, whereas Nancy attends to words rather in a poet's way, playing with sound, punning ... what we have here is extraordinary: a collaboration that throws light on processes of thinking, poetic or philosophical." --Rosmarie Waldrop, author, Driven to Abstraction "A significant contribution to the literature of phenomenology and a work of groundbreaking scholarship." --Richard Rand, professor, on Listening "It encompasses both philosophy and autobiography, intellectual exploration and examination of feeling." -- Shenandoah Literary on Or Consequence "Nancy is indeed one of the most interesting thinkers in France today." -- Common Knowledge on Being Singular Plural

ISBN: 9781890650674

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

200 pages