Quote:

 

two Rousselians have now bravely taken up the challenge of translating his most notoriously difficult achievements, Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa. Each poses a unique set of hurdles for any translator (except for the three words they share in their titles, the two are wildly different affairs). The prose work Impressions of Africa, translated by Mark Polizzotti, more closely hews to the techniques Roussel elaborated in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, unfurling an extravagant fabric of bizarre scenes engendered by the author’s complex method of linguistic free association. New Impressions of Africa (translated by Ford, Roussel’s biographer and a poet), a four-canto poem written in rhyming alexandrines that nominally spins off from a number of Egyptian settings, obeys its own beguiling rabbit-hole logic in a way that anticipates the Oulipian games decades in the future.