Joyce Mansour - In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems
Joyce Mansour
In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems
Translated from French by
C. FRANCIS FISHER
Preface by
MARY ANN CAWS
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
May 21, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-21-5
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
One of the most important female Surrealist writers, JOYCE MANSOUR (1928–1986) was born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cairo, where Mansour lived until she was forced to emigrate. She settled in Paris in 1953, where she continued writing and became a key member of the postwar Surrealist milieu. Mansour published sixteen books of poetry in her lifetime as well as prose and theater pieces. She died of cancer in Paris in 1986.
C. FRANCIS FISHER received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, "Self-Portrait at 25" was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw is her first book of translations.
MARY ANN CAWS is a writer, translator, art historian, and literary critic who has written widely on Surrealist poetry and art. She is the author of several biographies (Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí) and has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char. She is the editor of Manifesto: A Century of Isms and The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry.
Joyce Mansour
In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems
Translated from French by
C. FRANCIS FISHER
Preface by
MARY ANN CAWS
The first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris.
Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Bréton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.” In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher’s first published translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.
"C. Francis Fisher’s translations of Joyce Mansour’s later poems give fresh voice to a fierce, passionate, sensuous, scandalous cry that has strained to be heard in the Anglophone world for over half a century. It’s about time." —Mark Polizzotti
“Guillaume Apollinaire, Nelly Sachs, Frank O’Hara—how strange to find the magnificent Joyce Mansour, in C. Francis Fisher’s sinewy and imaginative translation, summoning that trio of revolutionary voices! Most of my life has been spent in ignorance of Mansour’s eccentric and eruptive genius. Thanks to this indispensable new translation, I can make amends, and hug close to me this most corporeal and threshold-traversing poet, who seems, like Louise Bourgeois, to be the apostle of fleshly metamorphosis. Torn between difficulty and joy, Mansour makes new—and blissfully out-of-bounds—limbs and organs emerge in every line, like a shower of comets.” —Wayne Koestenbaum
“Although allied to Surrealism, Joyce Mansour’s work exceeds the strictures of that movement—one could say that she stopped the surrealists in their tracks by giving body (parts) to their boy-dreams—proposing erotic visions that foreshadow the likes of Carolee Schneemann. What Serge Gavronsky called Mansour’s ‘verbal form of cannibalism’ is also an anguished meditation on death & freedom, ferociously anchored in the black humor of the uprooted & eternally exiled.” —Pierre Joris
“Don’t give her access to the morgue: she’ll wake the corpses.” —Alain Bosquet
“There is nothing here that doesn’t spill from the darkest depths of the soul, where love and death, distress and desire, pleasure and suffering fuse into a single all-consuming reality…It is essential in a time of pin-ups and cover girls, in a time of learned ignorance about true human needs, that a woman reminds us that love is a tragic experience, vital, like hunger, and femininity is a force to be reckoned with, capable of violence and cruelty as well as tenderness and joy.”—Jean-Louis Bédouin
“There is of course nothing little in this truly important poet, and this translation is no nibble at her production: this is a gulp worth gulping.” —Mary Ann Caws
BIOS
One of the most important female Surrealist writers, JOYCE MANSOUR (1928–1986) was born in England to Syrian-Jewish parents. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cairo, where Mansour lived until she was forced to emigrate. She settled in Paris in 1953 where she continued writing and became a key member of the post-war Surrealist millieu. Mansour published sixteen books of poetry in her lifetime as well as prose and theater pieces. She died of cancer in Paris in 1986.
C. FRANCIS FISHER received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, the Yale Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others. Her poem, "Self-Portrait at 25" was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. She has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Columbia University. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (World Poetry, 2024) is her first book of translations.
MARY ANN CAWS is a writer, translator, art historian, and literary critic, who has written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. She has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char, edited anthologies including Manifesto: A Century of Isms and The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, and has written widely on Surrealist poetry and art.
PRESS
Reviewed by Amir-Hussein Radjy for The Times Literary Supplement
Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero for Arteidolia
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
May 21, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-21-5
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
