Tentacular Cities by Émile Verhaeren

Description

Sublunary Editions, paperback

Publication Date: May 4, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Although a fair swath of Émile Verhaeren’s work has been translated into English, very little of the shocking collection of fin-de-siècle poetic modernism that helped to cement his reputation has been made available in English. Here at last is a full English version of Les Villes tentaculaires (1895), wrought in knotty, musical free verse. The poems of Tentacular Cities convey the reader into the brothels, cathedrals, factories, cabarets, markets, laboratories, and various other locales of the European metropolis. Here are dramatized the terror, the disgust, and the awe-inducing dynamism of Europe’s industrialized cities at the threshold of the twentieth century. The lurid atmosphere and ironical wit of Verhaeren’s verse are captured in a new translation by Jacob Siefring, who also provides an afterword and a note on the author.

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