Caramboles Reviewed on Sitaudis: Compte-rendu de Caramboles sur Sitaudis

My first book, to be released in October – only a few more weeks – has been reviewed on Sitaudis by Jean-Claude Pinson, to whom I present my heartfelt thanks.

The review is available here in the original French. Here is my English translation:

“With his debut collection Caramboles, Alexander Dickow, a young American poet, reveals a singular work. The bilingual volume is essentially composed of poems written twice by the same author – once in (American) English and once in French – and arranged according to a criss-crossing design that contributes to an intricate pattern of difference and repetition.

The memorable remark that Deleuze borrowed from Proust is a familiar one: works of any significance always give the impression of having been written in a sort of foreign language. If American English is indeed the author’s mother tongue and French his language of adoption, it cannot be said that Alexander Dickow merely translated his poems into French. By way of the face-to-face confrontation of the French and English texts, the author has worked rather toward a clash of the two languages, toward their collision [ carambolage ], their mutual subversion. For not only is the French language considered from a foreign point of view; the author’s mother tongue likewise finds itself undergoing a continual process of deformation. ‘I assault the French language, my second; I clutter it with l’on-lit and qu’on-con, unthinkable infractions, maim it with impossible malaprops,’ reads Alexander Dickow’s back cover presentation. But, he adds, he equally ‘embrace[s] every solecism, bludgeon[s] with blunders every ear within eyeshot; [...] merrily reduce[s] the English language to a frenzied shuffle .’

I cannot truly judge, for lack of linguistic competence, what becomes of the English, but it is clear that the French language exhibits a state of permanent inebriation as a result of this game of caroms [ dispositif de carambolage ]. Yet doubled in this way, raised to the second power, the process of defamiliarization, of ostranenie (as the Russian formalists called it), does not merely produce a confusion of identities (of syntactic identities especially) proper to each idiom. A new linguistic space seems to unfold as a result, an uncertain, improbable, troubling space where only the phantom limb of a third language, hovering somewhere between English and French, might provide a foothold.

More than any other infraction of ‘acceptable style’ [ ‘bon usage’ ], it is the deregulation of syntax, as in all-over painting, that lies at the root of this loudly professed mécriture. (1) But if it produces a feeling of discomfort, this feeling is also joyful, and transforms into jubilation. Certainly, one wants to ‘redress’ the syntax, ‘campaigns are launched against the crooked,’ yet at the same time, one delights to be in the presence of a language that ‘were just a thing / to call for’, that hits a poetic bull’s eye. For this language, unsettled and unsettling, also reveals its fortuities and its felicities [ trouvailles et bonheurs ]. These are not quite those of a child’s language, nor those of a foreigner struggling to speak French: it is elsewhere that they display that sovereignty of a ‘crowned anarchy’ (as Artaud would have said), of a language, or rather two languages, as though remade.

Paradoxically, since it is itself intrinsically in conflict with syntax, it is verse, in these poems, that allows the grammatical infractions to be ‘redressed,’ ‘counterbalanced’. A powerful force in compensating ‘philosophically’ for the ‘deficiency of languages’, as Mallarmé wrote, verse acts here a factor in the tension and speed, in the contour and cut of the text. It helps the writing of the poem to diverge unceasingly; to transcend, through the counter-syntax of verse, the confines of mere mécriture.

This is particularly visible, it seems to me, in the long, twofold narrative poem (‘Un conte, a tale/ A tale, un conte’) that forms the core of the book. Because it curtails narrative, letting only discontinuous segments of a story shine through, the techniques of verse whet the reader’s appetite even at the height of stylistic disturbance. For fantasy seeks its sustenance first and foremost in the ‘glimpses’ of a ‘disjointed scenario, always very brief’, as Barthes noted. And doubtless nothing can more effectively abridge a narrative than verse, riddling it with lacunae and thereby heightening the luster of the fragments that remain.

Something festive haunts these poems – the spirit of carnival, perhaps, since the title suggests the gleeful ricochets of bumper-cars. Yet, in the manner of Leopardi, the festival is always at a distance, as though it proved real only in its remotest strains, in its spindrift of words and phrases. Hence, if there is indeed in Caramboles the scent of idyllic possibility, of pleasure in the fairground tubas of language and their comic blurts, it is without disregarding our condition as beings cut off from the Open, or to borrow Christian Prigent’s term, as ‘departing’ [ partants ] beings (2):

‘Sand go among the fingers / for all the time, yes.’”

(1) Mécriture designates writing that deliberately contests the norms of literary taste and stylistic ‘elegance’. The term is derived from the title of Denis Roche’s Le Mécrit (1972), an avant-garde work that denounces all things poetic. The word mécrit is in fact an expressive portmanteau word that combines l’écrit (‘writing’) with le mépris (‘contempt’). Major mécrivains include Tristan Corbière, Alfred Jarry, François Rabelais and Léon Bloy in French; E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Amos Tutuola, John Berryman, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in English – among many others. In my opinion, this tradition is stronger and more well-defined in France than in Anglophone literatures. ( NdT )

(2) Christian Prigent plays (as he is wont) with the verbal resonance of the word partant. Although it principally means ‘departing [person],’ and thereby acts as a synonym (or euphemism?) for mortal, one may also be partant, ‘willing’ to do something (the dictionary provides the translation ‘count me in’ for the French expression je suis partant). And as a (relatively rare) conjunction, partant also means something close to ‘hence, therefore, consequently’. ( NdT )

By Jean-Claude Pinson, translation by Alexander Dickow. Original review published on Sitaudis: http://www.sitaudis.com/Parutions/caramboles-d-alexander-dickow.php.

Sep 8, 09:33 by Alexander Dickow
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