In the Image and Likeness

by Yurkievich, Saúl; Franzen, Cola

• ISBN13: 9780945774594
• ISBN10: 0945774591
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-07-01
• Publisher: Catbird Press

Summary

In the first half of this creative prose collection, Argentinian writer Saul Yurkievich looks at four great artists in four very different ways: an interior monologue by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Velazquez as he paints his masterpiece Las meninas late in life; a longer monologue by the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Spanish painter Goya, spoken to the duchess he loved, and often painted, upon learning of her death; short views of a series of engravings by Picasso; and a look at the German collagist Kurt Schwitters as he goes about his collection of scraps and castoffs, including the perfect element to complete Construction for Noble Ladies, the work on this book's cover. Since Yurkievich himself is a collagist, working with words and ideas, the Schwitters piece is the book's center. The second half of this book consists of many short pieces that are indescribable as poetry, that simply are. They display Yurkievich's humor and imagination, his sense of the absurd and his way with words. Each is a small delight. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Saul Yurkievich is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and fifteen volumes of criticism and creative prose. An Argentinian, he recently retired as professor of Latin American literature at the Universite de Paris Vincennes. This book's translator, Cola Franzen, won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for her translation of Jorge Guillen's Horses in the Air

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. v
Translator's Preface	p. 8
Figurations
About This Painted Dream	p. 11
Adored Duchess	p. 17
Comedy of Apparitions	p. 39
The Blue Train Car	p. 43
Spectacles
Pastime	p. 71
Crossing	p. 74
Why Bother to Read It	p. 75
Happiness	p. 76
Spectacle	p. 78
Inside Your Caverns	p. 82
Spaces	p. 83
So Then	p. 86
The Game of the World	p. 88
Advice Column	p. 92
Something Gives Him Away	p. 94
Novella	p. 95
A Gusto	p. 99
Trunkiness	p. 101
Story	p. 103
The Goal	p. 104
Fickle-Hearted Reader	p. 106
Amnesia	p. 109
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