Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period

Not to get all pedantic (but why not) the complaint about Eshleman’s translation:I doubt that Eshleman or anyone else would characterize him as a LANGUAGE poet;I’m not aware that Ferlinghetti did any of the translations in city lights Artaud anthology. The translators represented most look to me to be Jack Hirschman, the editor, and David Rattray;Hirschman was born in 1933, Rattray in 1946, and Eshleman in 1935. So whatever the issue with the translations, it can’t really be a generational one.

Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams (Exact Change, 1995)Will Exact Change ever put out a bad book? I fervently hope the answer to that question is "no." That said, Watchfiends and Rack Screams suffers from much the same problem as most ponderous tomes of selected works from major poets; it's simply too much of a good thing.The translation here is in the hands of the always capable Clayton Eshleman, who treats Artaud with all the reverence the man deserves. Eshleman is certainly no stranger to translating Artaud's later work (the translation of "Artaud le Momo" which appears here first appeared in Eshleman's fantastic anthology of translations Conductors of the Pit, which I cannot urge you enough to seek out), and he does the same fine job as usual here. Almost three hundred pages of it, however, tends to be a bit much all at once. This is a book to be lingered over for months, perhaps years, going back to it again and again as time passes and absorbing another bit of it at a time, rather than one to be read straight through. As well, Eshleman's introduction runs close to fifty pages. While it's certainly interesting enough stuff, fifty-page introductions are, in general, bad form. If you're going to add a fifty-page essay to a book of poetry, please, for the sake of the reader's sanity, make it an afterword, not a preface.All that said, the influence of the work of Antonin Artaud on modern poetry cannot be understated, and any serious aficionado-- and certainly any serious poet-- should have a copy of this on the bookshelf. It is a fascinating, disturbing portrait of a man's mind torn not only by the inner workings of his own nature, but also by a convergence of brutal external forces that cannot be comprehended by most living human beings. *** ½

This anthology documents work from Artaud's final period spent mainly in a mental institution. The poems are by far the strangest that I have encountered. Filled with odd incantatory stanzas fashioned in Artaud's own language, the poetry and prose in this collection requires some patience from the reader. Some of the poems/prose in this collection I found virtually impenetrable (e.g., "Artaud the Momo") but this only seems to heighten and augment my appreciative awe for Artaud as an artist/poet/prose magician. Even Artaud's letters venture into strange and unknown territory as they combine prose, poetry, and Artaud's own creative argot to produce an inexplicably chaotic amalgamation that can count as a literary genre unto itself.Although incredibly weird and convoluted, Artaud's work from this tumultuous period still manages to shine by dint of its strange qualities and inherent loopiness. If you happen to be interested in this type of enigmatic, dada-esque poetry/prose pick up this volume ASAP.

Artaud's genius was too much for his head, and it spilled out like corkscrews into a series of spiralling texts and flickered in a shower of sparks across the oceans, from France to the rest of the planet. Here Clayton Eshleman, the great translator of Artaud, assisted by another less successful translator, brings us a number of the more arcane texts. This book doesn't have everything in it, but what it does have is choice. You have to hand it to Exact Change. They may not do everything they do for the first time (although there are many texts in WATCHFIENDS previously available only in French, if at all) but when they do something, baby, it stays "done." Ideally this book would come with a DVD in which we could watch the recorded performances of the living Artaud, for even though he was not, as an actor, the very best exemplum of his theories, some memorable glimpses of him linger on via film.

....out of curiousity. I wanted to read the biography/poetry of the "genius playwright turned madman" and it pretty much turned out to be just that .....the ramblings of a very unhealthy mind teetering on sheer incomprehensible lunacy. If you like vulgar, stream-of-consciousness jibber-jabber Artaud is your poet.

here it is. the greatest collection of artauds poetry ever translated. of course it isnt as complete as that susan sontag one, but it is the best translations of his best poems and you dont have to drag your eyes through all that theatre theory even though it is brilliant some of us are more intrested in the none dramatic aspects of artaud. One of the highlights of watchfiends is the inclusion of parts of Suppots et Supplications, artauds last book length work, dictated to his secratery at the height of his madness. it has yet to be translated in full so to be able to read parts of it is a real treat. when i go to the park...when i think of all the pulleys and levers that are a complicated system which helps me to pray, i... listen, do you like poetry that creates a life or death situation for the author as well as the reader? im going to tell you a secret...this is one of the 3ree or 4our books that i would like to tear up into tiny pieces and inject into my hippocampus. ARTAUDARTAUDARTAUD. have i made myself clear?

Great