Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was an avant-garde French poet, playwright, and novelist. Born into a wealthy family, he devoted his life and fortune to crafting and publishing eccentric works of art that he thought would bring him universal acclaim. Alas, they only managed to baffle a few members of the French public and to be ignored by the rest. After his death, by suicide in Palermo, he published How I Wrote Certain of My Books, the skeleton key for his novels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa and some of his other writings. There he explains that he generated his texts with an elaborate method known as the “procédé,” based on the use of puns. Though his writing was embraced by the surrealists, Roussel’s work was virtually unknown during his lifetime. He remains an obscure figure to this day, but his influence on the 20th century French and American avant-garde is unparalleled. Besides the surrealists, his admirers include Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.

This year, two of his books have appeared in English. The first, Impressions of Africa, has been translated by Mark Polizzotti, author of books on André Breton, the Comte de Lautréamont, and Bob Dylan. Polizzotti is currently the Editor in Chief of the publishing wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The second, New Impressions of Africa, has been translated by Mark Ford, author of three collections of poetry and of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, a biography. Ford currently teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

In the following double interview, Polizzotti and Ford discuss the life and work of one of France’s strangest writers with TNI.