New Impressions of Africa

French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, originally published in 1932 and recently reissued in a new translation by Princeton University Press, is a hidden gem of avant-garde innovation and stands as a truly weird marvel of modernism. Roussel's Africa is a conceptual landscape, an imagined continent he explores and "colonizes" with his seemingly endless poetic possibilities. Roussel's densely digressive poem is presented in four cantos, each a single sentence, footnoted, illustrated with drawings, and infused with obscure, often vertiginous logic. But even with its contextual elusiveness, Roussel's language has a delicate dexterity that combines a mechanically impersonal tone with hypnotic syntactical rhythms. This uniquely odd poetic voice serves as a deft guide through the disorienting labyrinth of bizarre digressions that make up each canto. In the end, Roussel's arresting poem is a circuitous narrative puzzle; something to be pondered, marveled at, and revisited, if for no other reason than to experience an ineffable mind that continues to influence avant-garde artists. New Impressions of Africa is a work that lives up to Ezra Pound's modernist dictum to make it new.