Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh

First publication from the Contra Mundum Press

Gilgamesh, translated by Stuart Kendall

Contra Mundum Press is announcing that their first publication, Gilgamesh, should be entering online databases by the end of this month. The text was translated by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). 'Announcing the inaugural publication of Contra Mundum Press, a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, Gilgamesh. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.'

Critical Responses

As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical—as it has for several decades now—each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.

Jerome Rothenberg

This new translation of the Gilgamesh tale ventures outside the straitjackets that have often constrained the text, understanding its complicated transmission-history in the Sumerian and East Semitic languages of the ancient Near East and the way it evades modern ideas of ‘epic’ and ‘fiction’ often foisted upon it. In sharp, imagistic prose, Kendall shows how Gilgamesh’s story is not just an instructive yarn but a concerted act of ontological investigation. A needed provisioning of a much-discussed but little understood work

Nicholas Birns, Eugene Lang College, the New School

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Contra Mundum Press

A new publishing venture

Announcing the launch of a new publisher: Contra Mundum Press. Their first publication, due in October 2011, will be Gilgamesh in a new translation by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). Their next publication, due in December 2011, will be Paul Bishop’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama, translated into English for the first time (link via Superfluities Redux):

Contra Mundum Press is a new publishing venture dedicated to the value and the indispensable importance of the individual voice. Through the publication of new texts by distinctive contemporary thinkers from all fields of the life of the mind as well as out-of-print titles from innovators of the past, Contra Mundum Press has been organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up of the mob or the eviscerated diversion of social media but in the personal vision, and in the courage required to create it and to put it forth. [Read More]

contramundum.net

Forthcoming Titles

• Gilgamesh. Translated with an introduction by Stuart Kendall 
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Greek Music Drama. Translated with an introduction by Paul Bishop 
• W. J. Bate, Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats 
• Richard Foreman, Plays with Films: Zomboid!, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, and Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land. Introduction by George Hunka. 
• Georg Trakl, Poems. Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen
• Louis Auguste Blanqui, Eternity for the Stars. Translated with an introduction by Frank Chouraqui

Contact

Contra Mundum Press
P.O. Box 1326
New York, NY
10276

Email: info (at) contramundum.net

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

What is Hauntology?

On a recent trend in critical theory

Jacques Derrida, in a still from the film Derrida (dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, 2002)

As part of his 'In Theory' series published on The Guardian website, Andrew Gallix outlines 'hauntology' as the new (or not-so-new) vogue in contemporary theoretical practice:

Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher – whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific "cultural moment" – acknowledges that "There's a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: "the voice of the dead father". When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges's longing to capture in verse the "other tiger, that which is not in verse". Or Maurice Blanchot, who outlines what could be described as a hauntological take on literature as "the eternal torment of our language, when its longing turns back toward what it always misses". Julian Wolfrey argues in Victorian Hauntings (2002) that "to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns" so that "all stories are, more or less, ghost stories" and all fiction is, more or less, hauntological. The best novels, according to Gabriel Josipovici, share a "sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words". For the reader or critic, the mystery of literature is the opacity – the irreducible remainder – at the heart of writing that can never be completely interpreted away. The whole western literary tradition itself is founded on the notion of posterity, which Paul Eluard described as the "harsh desire to endure" through one's works. And then, of course, there's the death of the author ... All this, as you can see, could go on for quite a while, so perhaps we should wonder if the concept does not just mean all things to all (wo)men. Steen Christiansen, who is writing a book on the subject, explains that "hauntology bleeds into the fields of postmodernism, metafiction and retro-futurism and that there is no clear distinction – that would go against the tension which hauntology aims at".

As a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously "out of joint" (Hamlet is one of Derrida's crucial points of reference in Spectres of Marx). There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the "end of history". Meanwhile, new technologies are dislocating more traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for instance, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence. Internet time (which is increasingly replacing clock time) results in a kind of "non-time" that goes hand in hand with Marc Augé's non-places. Perhaps even more crucially, the web has brought about a "crisis of overavailability" that, in effect, signifies the "loss of loss itself": nothing dies any more, everything "comes back on YouTube or as a box set retrospective" like the looping, repetitive time of trauma (Fisher). This is why "retromania" has reached fever pitch in recent years, as Simon Reynolds demonstrates in his new book - a methodical dissection of "pop culture's addiction to its own past". [Read More]

Andrew Gallix, 'Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation'

guardian.co.uk, 17 June 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• René Girard and Mimetic Desire
• In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida