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The Plurality of Worlds of LewisAuthor: Jacques Roubaud Translator: Rosmarie Waldrop French Literature Series March 1995 109 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-069-4 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $7.96 
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Book Description
This collection of prose and poetry elaborates on themes explored in Roubaud's Some Thing Black, which the Times Literary Supplement called "a harrowing book . . . an elegy for our time." As in the earlier collection, Roubaud grapples with the grief he continues to feel at the untimely death of his young wife.
In parts 1 and 2, he uses the possible existence of many worlds as a means by which to transcend the trauma of this unbearable loss. (David Lewis's book On the Plurality of Worlds provided the inspiration and title for Roubaud's book.) These poems also rage against the limitations of poetry itself, which can only clarify the exactness of his grief, not assuage it. In part 3, Roubaud uses a mathematically precise form to explore the idea of form.
As a meditation on both grief and on poetry, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis is a memorable achievement.
About the Author
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Jacques Roubaud, born in 1932, has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and is one of the most accomplished members of the Oulipo, the workshop for experimental literature founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. He is the author of numerous books of prose, theatre, and poetry. Most notably, Dalkey Archive Press published two of his Hortense novels—Hortense Is Abducted and Hortense in Exile—his poetry collections Some Thing Black and Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, and his novels The Loop and The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador. |
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About the Translator
| Rosmarie Waldrop has translated works by Jacques Roubad, Edmond Jabès, and Paul Celan. |
Praise
"Writing as a poet-philosopher, Roubaud . . . casts a delicate net of language to apprehend ideas that most compel him . . . The poems . . . are filled with play of light and shadows, and define loss as if metered by questions, suppositions and impossibilities . . . Precisely measured and deeply moving, Roubaud's meditations are rendered in Waldrop's translation with force and nuance."—Publishers Weekly"Ghostly presences inhabit these spaces that these lyric poems and fluid fictions construct. Rosmarie Waldrop's translation brings to the surface the obsessive, repetitive thought patterns that characterize grief . . . Roubaud . . . asks language to propose equivalencies and transformations."—Texture
"Highly recommended."—American Poet
More Information
Also by Jacques Roubaud:Hortense in Exile
Hortense is Abducted
Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador
Some Thing Black
The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart
The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations
The Loop
Some Thing Black
The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart