King of a Hundred Horsemen - Marie Étienne; Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

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King of a Hundred Horsemen

Poems

Marie Étienne; Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks, October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-53192-8, ISBN10: 0-374-53192-7,
5 x 8 inches, 224 pages,
Trade Paperback, $16.00

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories Poetry Poetry in Translation

Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

King of a Hundred Horsemen is the first of Marie Étienne's books to be published in English, and it introduces a major voice in world literature to a new audience. For ten years, Étienne worked as assistant to the experimental French theater director Antoine Vitez, who combined a commitment to the classics with a passionate engagement with socially progressive causes in the years of the student uprisings in France and the Algerian independence movement. Étienne's poetry has been inspired by this same synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane, the everyday transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. In this book, through a complex but playful reinterpretation of the sonnet form, she moves from the jungles of Indochina to the Atlanta airport, tuning in to writers' voices and painters' visions, in a quest with dream-intensity both through and of our time.

King of a Hundred Horsemen—in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series's first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007—is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet.

Praise

Marilyn Hacker’s translation of Marie Étienne’s eleventh book of poems, King of a Hundred Horsemen, represents an ample first introduction to the work of this restlessly inventive French literary figure . . . Hacker finds in Étienne’s poetry ‘the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, of the tragic, of the quotidian transformed by the prisms of myth and history.’ This absorbent aspect of Étienne’s sensibility makes it difficult to categorize her style—but perhaps explains why King of a Hundred Horsemen was an attractive assignment for Hacker, a master formalist with a flair for the contemporary . . . In the proper spirit of an experimentalist, Étienne ends her book without clicking it shut. Instead, she implies that through her book she has been ‘a better singer, a better fighter,’ and so have we. The better singer in King of a Hundred Horsemen is sometimes lovely and lyrical, or surprising and pensive, or blunt and brutal. But perhaps Étienne’s ending is more shapely and traditional than advertised.”—Ron Slate, The Quarterly Conversation

"A beautiful, pensive novel-in-verse, King of a Hundred Horsemen presents one of France's most important contemporary writers at her most delicate and most complex. Étienne's integration of autobiography and haunting atmosphere make this not only the portrait of a life, but also that of a world in transition. Translator Marilyn Hacker, herself one of America's foremost poets, has rendered the whole beautifully, keeping all its nuances and sensuality alive."—Cole Swensen, author of Try and Goest

"Odd as it can be, and just that brilliant. I cannot possibly imagine anyone having dared to translate this . . . poem of a startling prose except Marilyn Hacker, whose triumph equals that of the author. Two bravas, please!"—Mary Ann Caws, author of Surprised in Translation and editor of The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

About the Author(s)

Marie Etienne

Marie Étienne is a poet and novelist who lives in Paris, where she is a frequent contributor to literary and book-review journals. Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems and seven published books of translations from the French.