20th C Poetics Rewritten

Kevin Carollo’s stunning review of Emilio Villa’s Selected Poetry in Rain Taxi (spring 2016)

“Hermetically dynamic, anciently postmodern, materially evanescent, marginally liminal, futuristically prehistoric, reclusively performative, vulgarly esoteric, erotically ascetic — and intensely, explosively, delightfully heteroglossic — this translation of the selected poetry of Emilio Villa relentlessly rewrites everything we think we know about twentieth-century poetics. To approach an understanding of Villa’s life work requires reimagining what translation is and how language means. His work, in turn, underscores the impossibility of completion, of a collected whole…

… Siracusa’s introduction to the life and work of this mercurial and sibylline master is excellent. And his deft, albeit necessarily “partial,” translations induce a curious effect, as if his translated Italian compels the English speaker to note the translated part of the heteroglossic, “original” whole.”

Purchase the spring 2016 issue of Rain Taxi to read the full review.

Lengthy sample of the Villa book available here

CMP at KGB!

Join us for an evening of readings by:

Allan Graubard — Gherasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey
Genese Grill — Robert Musil, Thought Flights
Nancy Kline — Lorand Gaspar, Earth Absolute
Allan Graubard — Ferit Edgu, Noone
Mary Shaw & François Cornilliat — Claude Mouchard, Entangled, Papers! Notes
Jason Mohaghegh — Ahmad Shamlu, Born Upon the Dark Spear

KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers. Curated by Suzanne Dottino

KGB Bar

85 E. 4th St., NYC

January 31, 2016

7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

 

Samples of all of our books available here

Moody Speculative Cosmology

Critical Inquiry on Frank Chouraqui’s exceptional tr. of Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars.

A crucial tome for Benjamin, Borges, & Sebald, to name but a few.

“our understanding of Blanqui stands to be permanently altered by Contra Mundum’s new English translation of Eternity by the Stars, a moody speculative cosmology he wrote while imprisoned at the Fort du Taureau in the early days of the Third Republic.” — Andrew Pendakis

Read the full piece here

 

Josef Winkler’s Graveyard

An excerpt of Adrian Nathan West’s tr. of Winkler’s Graveyard of Bitter Oranges

The Brooklyn Rail (December 9, 2015)

Lengthier sample of the book available here.

 

 

Richard Foreman in Conversation

Join legendary maestro of the theater, RICHARD FOREMAN, pioneering experimental filmmaker and teacher, KEN JACOBS, and playwright and essayist and theater/culture blogger, GEORGE HUNKA—to celebrate the publication of Richard Foreman’s latest two books:  The Manifestos and Essays (Theater Communications Group) and Plays with Films (the last three plays to be produced at the St. Mark’s Theater, magically brought to the page and published by Contra Mundum Press). 

Event date:

Monday, November 30, 2015 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Event address:

McNally Jackson Books

52 Prince St., NYC

 

 

Gellu Naum

Hyperion Gellu Naum Centenary Issue

Essays in English, French, & Romanian

+ tr’s of poems & more

Curated by Valery Oisteanu

Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics

Available on ISSUU.COM

Forgotten Modernist Masterpiece

Paul Griffiths on Szentkuthy’s PRAE, Tim Wilkinson’s “colossally laudable” translation, & so much more, in the TLS (Sept. 25, 2015)

“What if we found that something had long been missing from the great canon of modernist ancestors? What if, besides Proust and Musil and Joyce and Kafka, there were some other writer who had reconsidered what prose could be about — reconsidered how prose could be about anything at all? What if this other writer’s work were so dense as to be almost totally impenetrable, which is why it had been overlooked so long, but we were now coming to realize that the impenetrability‚ — being in the presence, as a reader, of a vast rockface with almost no footing — was entirely the point? What if, in other words, Miklos Szentkuthy?”

Republished in The Wall St. Journal

Italo Calvino in NYRB

“The Movies of My Youth”

An excerpt from Calvino’s intro to Fellini’s

Making a Film (Contra Mundum Press, 2015)

Adapted from “A Spectator’s Autobiography,” Federico Fellini: Making a Film, translated by Christopher Burton White

Part of a continuing NYR Daily series on life-changing films.

August 29, 2015, 9:46 am

Fringe Elements

Monica Carter on Adrian Nathan West’s tr. of Josef Winkler’s Natura Morta

“With proponents such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, it’s difficult to understand why Josef Winkler hasn’t garnered more of an English-speaking audience. He’s won many literary prizes in Germany and his native Austria, including the Alfred Döblin Prize for his novella, Natura Morta, in 2001. Winkler hasn’t had many works translated into English but thankfully, that seems to be changing with the release of When the Time Comes in 2013, Natura Morta in 2014 and Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015, both by Contra Mundum Press and translated by Adrian West.

In Natura Morta, a novella that reads like a demonic script version of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin directed by Michael Haneke, Winkler stays true to his themes of Catholicism, homoeroticism and death. In just over ninety pages, his indefatigable sensory detail pulses and throbs, rots and stinks, foams and drips, sweats and sticks so that the reader cannot escape the suffocating reality of the Roman marketplace, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.”

Read the full piece here: Three Percent

 

Shenanigans: Robert Musil

Robert Musil’s Thought Flights reviewed by mark Jay Mirsky

“There are writers who draw readers into their magnetic fields so that everything they write is of interest—because the author’s dreams, thoughts, questions, do not simply mirror the reader’s but take him or her through the looking glass into a secret world. Literature in this sense is not an entertainment, but an initiation. … Thought Flights, the most recent publication of Musil’s work is such a valuable addition to his published work. The handsome edition of Contra Mundum Press has a long, thoughtful introduction by Genese Grill. She speaks both to the complexity of translating Musil and to the psychology of his prose, particularly in the feullitons, short pieces which make up a significant number of the pieces in this collection. They may seem at first glance as Grill remarks, using a critical phrase of Musil’s like “soap bubbles,” or “shenanigans,” Spielerei, but in fact like his major opus, The Man without Qualities, they attempt to explore “the other condition.” She defines Spielerei in her introduction as, “timeless states hovering between decision and act, like Kafka’s.” —  Mark Jay Mirsky

Full review here: Numéro Cinq (July 2015)