Hiems

In 1977, the year Pascal Quignard began the Petits Traités — fragmentary, rebellious texts of a curious erudition — he first published a slim volume that he would later class among his “most far-fetched arpeggio exercises,” fruits of his training in the “post-1968 underground movements” (Quignard, quoted by V. Landel, “Le passé recomposé,” Magazine littéraire no. 233): Hiems, issued by Éditions Orange Export Ltd., founded a few years earlier by Emmanuel Hocquard and Raquel Levy.

Twenty-five years before Les Ombres errantes, Quignard here already approaches a “book of winter,” since “winter is the time that follows the solstice (the time following the solstice is called hiems in Latin, whence the adjective hiémal, meaning ‘of winter’),” in which words — here Latin ones — become figures and images, that of the “piece of mist” formed by frozen breath, the visible wisp of air floating before the mouth as it opens to speak.

“Quignard already does for Latin what he would do systematically for English in L’Occupation américaine: he multiplies passages in the original language and immediately translates them with deliberate awkwardness, keeping to a rough word-for-word rendering, the very starting point one is meant to smooth into proper French in the schoolroom exercise of the version” (Catherine Soulier, “Sarx, Hiems,” in Anabases, December 2010, pp. 220–225).

Pascal Quignard’s first book.

Slight sunning to the upper margin of the wrappers.