Julien Gracq - Abounding Freedom
Julien Gracq
Abounding Freedom
Translated from French by
ALICE YANG
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
224 pages
May 23, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-22-2
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
JULIEN GRACQ (1910-2007) was born Louis Poirier. The pen name he eventually adopted is a combination of Julien Sorel, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and the Gracchi brothers of the Roman Republic. A history and geography teacher for much of his life, Gracq published his first book in 1938, The Castle of Argol, which André Breton praised as the first Surrealist novel. In 1951, Gracq won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore, but refused it out of disdain for the literary establishment. He is one of the few writers whose complete works were published during their lifetime by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s most prestigious collection of classic authors.
ALICE YANG is a teacher and translator based in Lyon, France. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Two Lines, The Yale Review, and AGNI. She studied literature at Yale.
Julien Gracq
Abounding Freedom
Translated from French by
ALICE YANG
Celebrated French novelist Julien Gracq’s only book of poetry presented with “The Road,” a contemporaneous piece of poetic prose, in a new translation by Alice Yang.
Written over a twenty-year span, the dense, lyrical prose poems of Abounding Freedom illuminate the hidden lives of places as they take us into the workings of the imagination itself. This collection opens a door onto the evolution of Gracq’s work, from his early Surrealist experiments to the more grounded land- and cityscapes that characterize his later style. Upon its original publication, René Char called Abounding Freedom a "miracle." Our edition will also include Alice's translation of “The Road,” a fragment of an unfinished novel that extends the narrative tendencies of Gracq’s later poetry.
“In this miserable march through the books of poetry published these days arrives the miracle of Abounding Freedom.” —René Char
“Alice Yang has beautifully registered the groove and gyre of Gracq’s prose poetry as nobody before.” —Richard Sieburth
“Dexterity, daring, and a honed sense of responsibility—all come together in Abounding Freedom to create a dreamlike flow that absorbs and reconceives the world. Alice Yang has listened in exemplary fashion to an extraordinary French writer and brought us radical, vital dimensions of his work. The difficulty involved in this sort of translation can’t be overstated, and it is Yang’s remarkable accomplishment that the unsettling pleasures of Gracq’s poems are sustained throughout this artful collection.” —Peter Cole
“Julien Gracq is a poet and novelist of the in-between, of the interstices and waiting periods of life and history. The payoff of this state of untetheredness is flight: imaginative leaps, dreamy landscapes, shards of unforgettable images rendered in agile sentences. In this new collection of prose poems from across Gracq’s career, accompanied by a fragment from an unfinished novel, Gracq’s sentences are rendered equally nimbly in English by Alice Yang. Gracq’s own untetheredness—he was deliberately out of step with any particular literary circle—means he’s under-read, especially in English, but there’s no pleasure quite like the breathless lift of Gracq’s language as the world he describes unfurls out of the fog and into shimmering sensory detail. Truly, more Julien Gracq in the world for Anglophone readers is cause for celebration.” —Lindsay Turner
“The world of Julien Gracq is a world of qualities—in other words, a magical world.” —Maurice Blanchot
“We all have selfish reasons for rereading a writer: to find the expression of what we feel but can’t put into words. What I enjoy in Gracq’s work is his profound attention to landscapes and topographies, to what might be called ‘the spirit of places.’” —Patrick Modiano
BIOS
Julien Gracq (1910-2007) was born Louis Poirier. The pen name he eventually adopted is a combination of Julien Sorel, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and the Gracchi brothers of the Roman Republic. A history and geography teacher for much of his life, Gracq published his first book in 1938, The Castle of Argol, which André Breton praised as the first surrealist novel. In 1951, Gracq won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore, but refused it out of disdain for the literary establishment. He is one of the few writers whose complete works were published during their lifetime by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, France’s most prestigious collection of classic authors.
Alice Yang is a teacher and translator based in Lyon, France. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, Two Lines, The Yale Review, and AGNI. She studied literature at Yale.
PRESS
Reviewed by Matthew Taylor Blais for The Collidescope
Reviewed by Léon Pradeau for Antiphony
Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero for Arteidolia
Bilingual Edition
224 pages
May 23, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-22-2
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
