A Comme Babel

A Comme Babel is the second project of the collaborative series Passages of Babel. Guillaume Métayer originally wrote the series of twelve essays on poetics and translation for the online literary review Catastrophes. These essays were then published as a book by la rumeur libre in 2020. Métayer received the prestigious prix Roger Caillois for A Comme Babel in 2023.
Guillaume is a remarkable poet, translator of German, Hungarian and Slovenian and I was delighted when he agreed to participate in Passages of Babel. There was no official translation in English when I started working on the book in 2022 so I embarked on it with the help of DeepL and ChatGPT! The book features fifteen different languages. They are color coded in the artists' book. Brian Henry generously contributed a beautiful translation of Aleš Šteger's poem A. There is no better and brilliant guide than Guillaume to explore translation and poetry. And as happens within Babel, A Comme Babel and Arise by Any Other Name share the same sense of wonder and love of language. Both books take us on eccentric and imaginative journeys in the Babelian world.