Les derniers travaux inédits d'Artaud.
Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go "up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor," and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud's close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an "impossible" book, and that "nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author."
Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman's poetry magazine, Sulfur. This volume presents his translations with additional ones by Stephen Barber, Paul Buck, and Catherine Petit it in its complete form in English for the first time.
Théoricien du théâtre, acteur, écrivain, essayiste, dessinateur et poète français,
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) est une figure essentielle de l'avant-garde
européenne du XXe siècle, dans les domaines de la
littérature, du théâtre, de l'art et de l'expérimentation sonore, célèbre notamment pour ses relations complexes avec le mouvement
surréaliste, ses théories de la performance, ses incarcérations en asile et ses œuvres d'art qui ont fait l'objet d'expositions majeures, au MoMA de New York et dans les plus grands musées.
Voir aussi
Isidore Isou : Antonin Artaud torturé par les psychiatres ;
Uno Kuniichi :
Artaud pensée et corps.
