Meet the author: Lisa Robertson
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For Passa Porta, the English-speaking Canadian writer Lisa Robertson will shed light on the visions of femininity and poetry at the heart of her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal. She will be joined by her translator Jeannot Clair and Quebecois author Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer , an expert in self-portraiture in fiction.
One morning in 1995 in a Vancouver hotel room, Hazel Brown discovers that she has written the complete works of Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil and The Painter of Modern Life are actually hers. Shocked by this revelation, Hazel delves into her childhood memories and relates the time when, as a penniless poet like Baudelaire, she lived like a dandy in the Paris of the 1980s: shabby maids’ rooms and skinny boys, a servant’s wages and an obsession with clothes. Although sure of her vocation and of her thirst for lyricism and beauty, young Hazel struggles with her desires. ‘I was looking for Beauty: I didn’t exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write. No other future seemed preferable. Let me be clear: I did not want to admire life, I did not want to skim it; I wanted to swim in it.’
Destroying women poets
Diffracted between eras, guided by her notebooks and diaries, Hazel Brown wonders how to embody a femininity other than that of object reflected back to her by her lovers and employers. And even by literature itself, because poetry – and poets – destroy women who write. This is a hypnotic, exploratory travelogue that summons Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath …
At Passa Porta, Lisa Robertson will be in conversation with her translator Jeannot Clair (behind the remarkable French translation of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts). The discussion will be moderated by Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer, a specialist in literary self-portraiture and author in residence at Passa Porta in January and February 2024.
Le Devoir
Anne Boyer
London Review of Books
About the speakers
Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto in 1961. She lived in Vancouver before moving to France in 2003, where she still lives. Since XEclogue (1993), she has published several books of poetry and two collections of essays. She is one of the most influential English-language poets of her generation and has taught at a dozen universities around the world. Her French-language books include Debbie: une épopée (Joca Seria, 2021), Le temps (Nous, 2016) and Cinéma du présent (Théâtre Typographique, 2015).
Jeannot Clair has translated several novels and literary essays from English into French, including Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, published in the series Points Féministe. He lives in Montreal.
About the moderator
Karianne Trudeau Beaunoyer is a Quebecois writer born in Montreal, where she writes and teaches. In residence at Passa Porta in January and February 2024, she will be writing a fictional essay that combines urban legends and personal narrative to explore the ambiguous postures of class defectors. The author of a thesis on the literary practice of self-portraiture, she is an avid reader of Lisa Robertson.
Org. Passa Porta, Editions du Quartanier
picture © Sina Queyras
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