Triste Tristan

Poetry. Translated by Laura Marris and Rosmarie Waldrop. TRISTE TRISTAN quilts the early medieval versions by Thomas of Britain and Beroul together with a demythologizing perspective that "takes down the pants of the lyrical tradition." Other poems take us on walks through Brittany and drives through North Carolina that fuse landscape, language, history, and memory into a complex space in motion. While Keineg's work began tonally between song and angry scream these more recent poems give a larger place to humor and irony as well as to a more nuanced, polysemous language. which has been nourished by his living in between Breton, French, and English. When "all languages are always foreign" it is impossible to have a naive, unreflected relation to any one of them--or to their literatures.