Description
Chris Tysh’s HOTEL DES ARCHIVES is a trilogy of books comprising verse recastings from the French novels of Beckett, Genet and Duras. These are transcreations that allow her to forsake the traditional mode of self-expression in favor of one that “translates” other cultural materials, forming an artistic network beyond boundaries and temporalities. “More than just fundamental literary archives of the French patrimoine,” she writes in the Preface, “for me these texts materialize the very notion of alterity, of being the other, l’étranger, the sexual pariah, the female voyeur: the Irishman writing in the langue of Racine, the con man dreaming of young assassins, the woman jilted at the municipal ball. To fold these bodies and images into song is my siren’s call.” Resonating with a variety of intertextual and interlingual strategies and an aesthetics of appropriation, détournement, and sampling, the work operates a double shift of genre and language moving directly from the original French prose to its own species of lyric.
