Max Jacob is getting some noise in the press! Rosanna Warren’s Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters just got reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post:
Our copy just came in the mail and I’ve not read it yet. It is notable that this is out there. Before, Max’s torch had been kept lit mostly by poets who shared him with other poets inspiring the work of still more poets. When we began work on our book there wasn’t much out there easily to be had about Max and his life. We ordered a book in French, which after tearing the house upside down I cannot lay my hands on now, and a crumbling copy of the Gallimard edition of “Le Cornet a Des”, but that was about all we had.
“Three tangerines (one eaten), book, glass of wine” by Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press
Some authors you come to through great marble portals while for others you find yourself swept up in a weird and gathering parade beginning on a Tuesday afternoon. We came to Max Jacob that way.
I’ve mentioned before we first heard of Max Jacob through a couple of Alastair Johnston’s translations in Alisa Golden’s Star 82 Review. When I read them there my ears shot up like a cartoon dog’s, complete with an exclamation point in a bubble over my head. I wrote Alastair, saying how great I thought they were and thus it came to be that we were entrusted to print those and the other translations he’d done decades ago when he was reading Max Jacob in the original French along with a circle of other poets who’d caught wind of him then.
Some months later we were at the press finishing up the original batch of poems when my phone dinged and up popped a new translation from Alastair, this from Poem (Sitting Ducks),
“I cannot enter this biblical landscape, because it’s a woodcut: I even know the engraver. When the Imperial generals’ hats are restored, everything is back to normal; I re-enter the woodcut and calm reigns in the desert of art.”
Doug and I looked at each other. We were going to be adding leaves to the book.
Another day at the press, as we were wrestling with a hair stuck in between an “n” and a space, another poem, Superior Degeneracy, came through, this one about a troubling voyage of a dirigible,
“But, ô balloon, take care! shadows in your gondola are stirring, ô unhappy dirigible! the aeronauts are drunk.”
And it went on like that.
Alastair’s translations are superior. They are thrilling and exquisitely tender. I admit to being hit with one or two while setting a page and finding myself weeping, like for instance this one from A Smile for a Hundred Tears,
“Springtime played bowls with the green trees & forty foals were thrown up by the valley.”
I love poetry for no reason but as somebody who goes after a cherry cordial chocolate because it tastes good and reaches for more and somehow comes to love all the ways it came to them, in this case through Alastair’s soul and wit and all there was that made Monsieur Max Jacob. I want to eat him up and am so excited about Rosanna Warren’s biography. I’m about to tuck in. You?
Check out our book, Omnia Vanitas, Translations of Max Jacob by Alastair Johnston for a rollicking ride with our friend Max.
-Jinny
You can buy our book here: https://www.thyrsuspress.com/sales/omniavanitas
And watch a flip through of Omnia Vanitas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj9_NcPk8OY&t=19s
Or listen to Alastair read a handful of the poems in Omnia Vanitas read aloud here: https://soundcloud.com/search?q=thyrsuspress?