Judas Eye and Self-Portrait/Deathwatch - Breyten Breytenbach 1988 Farrar Strauss & Giroux 1st HBDJ

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Condition: Good: Good condition for a used book! Some wear. See images for the condition of this book.  First American edition!

Blurb:  "Judas Eye really starts with the second poem it collects, "memory one": right at the get-go it illustrates Breytenbach's marvellous talent for the surreal hook in the reader's heart, the brief glimpse of the wound which generates language but also the beauty of well crafted speech. It goes like this:

I remember:
for that one measureless moment
my hands cupped around the sun
a cage
and I saw
fluttering, fleeter than any colour or outline
and I sipped
till my tongue was still with the pain:


Some of the poems are familiar from Denis Hirson's previous translations of the Afrikaans work Breytenbach produced while in prison from 1975 to 1982. Others are rewrites. All, the poet tells us, should be read as transformations, with the understanding Octavio Paz would give the term to translations of poetry. While there are a few weaker offerings, and many inconsistencies across the volume as a whole, Breytenbach's voice here rises in strength and confirms itself in confident treatments of his subject matter"