| Among the Blacks | ||
| by Raymond Roussel & Ron Padgett | ||
| 64 pages | ISBN 0-939691-02-7 | $7.50 |
| Cover by Trevor Winkfield | ||
Among the Blacks consists of two works: Padgett's translation of Roussel's
early story "Parmi les noirs," first published in 1935 in his book Comment
j'ai écrit certain de mes livres, together with Padgett's memoir
focusing upon his own experience among black people. Roussel's story, about a
master mariner named White who encounters an African chief named Booltable, is
built upon the kind of whimsical and extravagant word play (its first and last
sentences are identical except for one letter in one word--"pooltable"/
"Booltable") for which Roussel was idolized by the French Surrealists. In
contrast, as he writes in his Afterword, Padgett's memoir "grew out of the
nagging need to come to grips with the frustrations of being a white American
who had grown up in a racist environment and who, despite his rejections of
racism at an early age, had rarely felt unselfconscious in the company of a
black person." Its language is transparent and unmannered, "an attempt simply
to tell the truth, and to do so with a minumum of artfulness."
return to Avenue B
"Raymond Roussel, or genius in the pure state . . ."
"What he leaves us with is a work that is like the perfectly preserved temple
of a cult which has disappeared without a trace, or a complicated set of tools
whose use cannot be discovered. But even though we may never be able to 'use'
[Roussel's] work in the way he hoped, we can still admire its inhuman beauty,
and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its
secret, of pointing the way back to the 'republic of dreams' whose insignia
blazed on his forehead."
"Ron Padgett is a complex figure: brash and bashful, streetwise and wonderful,
boyish and cultivated, zany and commonsensical, American and cosmopolitan, wily
and naïve, understated and extravagant, artful and fresh, sympathetic and
reserved, wry and plainspoken."
"Recommended for the consummate litterateur, and for those who don't know any
better."