Stèles

Trained as a surgeon and a Chinese interpreter, Victor Segalen has come to be widely recognized in recent years as one of the luminaries of French modernity. With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre - the stele-poem - in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced, and fully translated. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914. A companion volume of critical resources for students and scholars will be available online.