Marie Étienne

Marie Étienne

Marie Étienne is a French poet and novelist. In 2009, her book Roi des cent cavaliers (published in France in 2002) and now translated into English as King of a Hundred Horseman won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.^[1][2] Étienne is the author of eleven books of poems and nine books of prose, which her translator Marilyn Hacker says "could be variously classed as fiction, memoir, and cultural history, some partaking of all three".^[1][3][4]

From 1979 to 1988, Marie Étienne worked as assistant to the innovative French theater director Antoine Vitez, whose courses on the theater she had followed as part of her doctoral thesis research, at the Théâtre d’Ivry and the Théâtre national de Chaillot.^[1] Her work with Vitez, including transcriptions of her notebooks of the era, resulted in Antoine Vitez: Ie roman du théâtre (2000), a book Hacker describes as "in a genre Americans would call literary memoir published a decade after the director’s death and almost twenty years after their collaboration. It offers an invaluable aperçu of a collaborative artistic endeavor and a signal era in contemporary French theater".^[1]

Awards

• 1997 Mallarmé prize
• 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Works

• "Ocean / Emotion", Poetry Daily
• Blancs Clos 1977
• Le Point d'Aveugement 1978
• Lettres d'Idumee ; precedees de, Peage. Seghers. 1982. ISBN 978-2-221-00996-3.
• Le Sang du Guetteur. Diffusion PUF. 1985. ISBN 978-2-86869-008-1.
• Eloge de la rupture. Ulysse, fin de siecle. 1991. ISBN 978-2-908007-25-1.
• Anatolie. Flammarion. 1997. ISBN 978-2-08-067413-5.
• Senso, la guerre. Balland. 2002. ISBN 978-2-7158-1385-4.
• Antoine Vitez: Le roman du theatre, 1975-1981. Balland. 2000. ISBN 978-2-7158-1274-1.

Translations

• Marie Etienne (2008). King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems. Translator Marilyn Hacker. Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53192-8.

Anthologies

• Mary Ann Caws, ed. (2004). The Yale anthology of twentieth-century French poetry. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10010-5.

Reviews

Originally published in French in 2002, Marie Étienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, translated by Marilyn Hacker, occupies an odd position somewhere between poetry and prose, observation and memory, dramatic enunciation and factual report. Although the opening sequence evokes the Parisian poet’s upbringing in French Indochina, the book is constructed around a deliberate lack of any anchoring subjectivity....^[5]

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.^[6]

References

1. Marilyn Hacker: King of a Hundred Horsemen received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
2. Hacker also won the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series for her work as translator
3. John C. Stout L' Énigme-Poésie: Entretiens Avec 21 Poètes Françaises - Page 99 - 2010 "Dès son premier livre, La Longe (1979) s'annoncent les aspects clé de l'écriture de Marie Étienne : d'abord, le besoin de ... En 2002, elle a publié Roi des cent cavaliers et, en 2006, Dormans (tous les deux parus aux éditions Flammarion)."
4. Action poétique 2002- Numéros 166 à 169 - Page 161 "La Chronique de Claude Adelen « C'est l'amour même qui la menace » Marie Étienne, Roi des cent cavaliers, Flammarion « Un livre est quelqu'un. Ne vous y fiez pas. Prenez garde à ces lignes noires sur du papier blanc ; ce sont des forces "
5. Lindsay Turner. "King of a Hundred Horsemen". Boston Review.
6. http://quarterlyconversation.com/king-of-a-hundred-horsemen-by-marie-etienne-review

External links

• "A bilingual reading", the Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore, 22 juin 2009
• Michael Bishop (1995). Contemporary French women poets, Volume 2. Rodopi. ISBN 978-90-5183-895-4.
• Marilyn Hacker's 'Translator's Preface' to King of a Hundred Horseman