Grand Hotel of Foreigners, The
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Jul 1998
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780921833598
- Publish Date
- Jul 1998
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
In The Grand Hotel of Foreigners, Claude Beausoleil invites the reader on a voyage which is as much an interior one as a physical one. The narrator explores themes which are important to him, offering an urbane space in which he questions himself about the nature of solitude, wandering, the distance which forms and grows between people, and writing. Beausoleil sustains a strong, rich rhythm which transports the reader and makes him into a traveller into his own mysteries. The Grand Hotel of Foreigners transcended the page and became virtual poetry in a multimedia show created by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon in collaboration with Claude Beausoleil, which toured the United States, Canada and Venezuela.
About the authors
Contributor Notes
Since 1972, Claude Beausoleil has published 58 books, including Intrusion ralenti, Avatars du trait, Le Dormeur, Fureur de Mexico, La vie singulière, Le Rythme des lieux and Rue du jour. He published his first novel, Fort Sauvage, in 1994 and has also edited numerous anthologies, including La poésie canadienne and La poésie mexicaine. Beausoleil teaches at Montreal's Collège Édouard-Montpetit.
From 1978 to 1985 Beausoleil was the poetry critic for Le Devoir in Montreal. He has collaborated on many literary magazines both in Québec and internationally, including Estuaire, Nuit blanche, Jungle and Europe. He is the director of the poetry magazine Lèvres urbaines which began in 1983.
In the course of his career, Beausoleil has won many prizes, including the Nelligan poetry prize, the Grand prix de poésie du Journal de Montréal, the prix Estuaire des Terrases Saint-Sulpice and the Georges-Limbour prize in France. He received the Ordre des Francophones d'Amerique in 1989.
About the translators
George Morrissette is a Winnipeg-based poet.
Jed English lives in France, where he writes and translates poetry in connection with the Centre Georges-Pompidou.
Excerpt: Grand Hotel of Foreigners, The (by (author) Claude Beausoleil; translated by Jed English & George Morrissette)
Liminaire
We must bear witness with grandeur to our loss set out for the roads of the world leaving tracks with no return there in the burnt blackness of things in spite of the white blankness within us to go the distance among broken words the raucous sounds and nothing mixed with nothing we must foresee all name all regain all memory where our souls implode a renaissance of light dustclouds between feelings and cities distinguishing the skyline linked to the metals of urgency by the exact beauty of the bruises when the crystalline light shatters the horizon radiating the hopes of a song a quiet song so profound become again imaginable knowing that we must lose all to discover the chasms to dream without illusion but without being silenced to go the distance to write to live and to love in the infinite desire of the face of time
Editorial Reviews
“The translation captures Beausoleil's atmosphere of psychological ambivalence. The author's manipulation of time, alternating stark and muted imagery, and rigorous economy of text all contribute to the eerie ambiance and urgent rhythms of the Hotel where strangers check in and (just maybe) language checks out.”
—Perimeter
