The Big Game / Le grand jeu by Benjamin Péret, translated by Marilyn Kallet

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Benjamin Péret transposed scenarios by flipping them on their head. In her introduction to The Big Game, translator Marilyn Kallet remarks how, in one poem, Péret's speaker sighs to a piece of cheese that “there’s a fine lady on the scene,” rather than informing said lady of the availability of cheese. Priorities shift, and so do addressees: via automatic writing, the poem becomes a place for translating things back over, turning them over to the unassuming interlocutor, and in so doing, reversing language’s direction. Hence, Péret addresses the cheese and not the woman, and in “Adventures of a Toe,” he ventriloquizes each material being (the hydrangea, the mandolin, the coin, etc.) to address its adjacent neighbor. Things fall upon one another and fold into each other.
—Alex Braslavsky

Benjamin Péret, translated by Marilyn Kallet. The Big Game / Le grand jeu. Boston: Black Widow Press, 2011.