The Revolution Amid the Revolution — Patrick Autréaux
on Le Poète comme un boxeur by Kateb Yacine
“Trusting in a well-travelled subjectivity, one well tempered, that has acquired a patina; trusting in the choice to move books to one’s desk or bedside table, to move them onto one pile or another, to upend the pile itself; trusting to luck in book shops or with dealers, to luck alone. I glimpse Cossery’s name in a window display and, gradually, it is Choukri’s sharp tone, Genet’s choppy whisper, the discordance of Guyotat’s voice that I hear. And over all of them is imposed that of Yacine …”
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My translation of Patrick Autréaux’s ‘The Revolution Amid the Revolution: on Le Poète comme un boxeur by Kateb Yacine’ is now up at Sublunary Editions.
Click here to read.
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Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Survive; Verdier, 2013). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux (The Husband) will be published by Gallimard in Spring 2025. Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English as In The Valley of Tears published by UIT Books, and his essays have appeared in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 9), Asymptote, and 3AM Magazine. Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier, 2021), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated to Spanish and published by Canta Mares.