“King of a Hundred Horsemen . . . cultivates a hybrid lyricism, rooted in autobiography yet oblique and fragmentary, synthesizing lived experience and literary allusion, truncated narrative and gnomic utterance, shifting between voices and genders. Hacker's rendering keeps pace with Étienne's metamorphic French, finding analogous registers and styles. But she also exploits the heterogeneous resources of English to release a stream of surprising effects, each verbal choice becoming an interpretive move that captures and enriches its French counterpart.” —citation for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

“In King of a Hundred Horsemen, the images of the past, imagined and real, return to haunt the present, shaping identity like the nudge of a guilty conscience.” —Clinton Krute, The Brooklyn Rail

“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

“Odd as it can be, and just that brilliant. I cannot possibly imagine anyone having dared to translate this singularly angled 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