Pierre Joris
PHOTO © GUY JALLAY

Latest News

Pierre was awarded the 2021 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation

The PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony honors and celebrates remarkable literature, along with the writers, translators, editors, and publishers who helped these stories come to life. Read more here, and watch video of the April 8, 2021 award ceremony here.

Just Published


Fox-trails, -tales & -trots

Fox-trails, -tales & -trots
Fox-trails, -tales & -trots is an assemblage of proses and poems on the themes of foxes, Renert, Luxembourg and America, hunting, healing, translating and writing. Renert is in Luxembourg, but also in New York with nomadic Joris who explores with him the meanings of identity, migration, language and literary creation. ‘Pierre Joris is the turbulence of the world in words of betweenness, an omnicultural shaman, you never know where he takes you with his rhizomatic writing; it’s not a direction, it’s not a way, it’s opening, oscillation and becoming.’ — Nico Helminger

Paul Celan Microliths They Are, Little Stones

Translated by Pierre Joris. In the mid-fifties Paul Celan suggested that he had a mind for writing that “would be a bit more sober & more spacious” than his poems. And yet, in his life-time Celan published very little of such “more spacious” work — i.e. prose — except for two essays that were public award-acceptance speeches, and a few occasional bits and pieces often published, or better, hidden away in obscure places. It is only with this volume, edited by Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou, that Celan’s multifaceted achievements as a prose writer can be discovered.

A City Full of Voices

Edited by Pierre Joris with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger. Robert Kelly is one of the major and most prolific American poets of our time. Between 1961 when his first collection, Armed Descent, was published by Hawk’s Well Press, and Seaspel, brought out in 2019 by Lunar Chandelier Collective, Kelly has published some 66+ books of poetry as well as 14 volumes of prose, including novels, short stories, & essays. A City Full of Voices is the companion volume to the 2014 A Voice Full of Cities, the Collected Essays of Robert Kelly, also published by Contra Mundum Press.

Arabia (not so) Deserta : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture

This is a treasure, a caravanserai of a book, erudite, personal, enlightening. Pierre Joris poet, translator, editor, anthologist scholar, flâneur par excellence—is an incomparable and friendly guide to these realms, his lifelong passion and esprit manifest and up for the rigor of this vast deserta. — Anne Waldmann





Adonis & Pierre Joris: Conversations in the Pyrenees

Adonis in the Pyrenees: another “conversation in the mountains” where a multiplicity of orients and occidents intermingle, where dialogue between Adonis, the major Arab-language poet at work today, and Pierre Joris, nomad poet between the United States, Europe and North Africa, becomes polylogue.





Stations d'Al-Hallaj

Extraits du livre Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj, traduit par Habib Tengour et publié dans sa collection "Poèmes du monde," aux Editions APIC, Alger, 2018.





Safaa Fathy: Revolution Goes Through Walls

Poems by Safaa Fathy, translated by Pierre Joris with Safaa Fathy; Preface by Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote: "It is a story of walls. They bar the way, resist, stand against. But they have fissures too. And one also can stick photos placards graphs poems screams into them."





The Book of U

"before the walk: the hope to meet / cormorants, my cormorants./ & ask them to regurgitate / matter enough for a poem." Published in Luxembourg by Galerie Simoncini Editeur in 2017. Available from the publisher in pb or bibliophile edition, each one of which contains a painting by Nicole Peyrafitte.

Canto Diurno

"'Traduit de l'anglais sous la direction de Jean Portante Cette anthologie personnelle couvre l'œuvre de Pierre Joris depuis le début des années 1970 jusqu'à nos jours. Le choix est celui de l'auteur ; les traductions sont de Jean Portante, Michel Maire, Habib Tengour, Éric Sarner, et de l'auteur lui-même. Son œuvre déconstruit les normes poétiques traditionnelles et affiche des impressions de la culture quotidienne américaine, de même que des influences de l'éducation classique européenne et des civilisations arabes. Préface de Charles Bernstein.

The Agony of I.B.

"'HANS WERNER HENZE ... we cannot simply rewrite the myths of old! INGEBORG BACHMANN Why not? Myths are just stories told. Stories that kill us all too often. Turn them on their heads. Rewrite them, retell them... The snake flame bit me, I feel it, I think I am dying unless I'm already dead. That's what myths do to women, they turn us into Helens, guilty by birth, guilty by desire, guilty by thought until killed and then pure figments of male imagination.... Am I dying?...How do you know you are dying?

An American Suite

"'Fusing lyric, theory, and diary, following Joris from the Belgian coast via London to his room in Oued El Had, Algeria, to a New York-bound flight and a North Carolina lake, An American Suite is a passionate rendering of interstices, not destinations. These poems offer a many-faceted glimpse into the early life and language of a celebrated poet, translator, essayist, and anthologist whose work pursues, and is pursued by, explorations of immanent knowledge, polyphonic dissonance, and cross-cultural reconciliation. Edited and with an introduction by Tamas Panitz and featuring a cover designed by Nicole Peyrafitte.

MAWQIF

"'The word is/as the mawqif, the station, the oasis, the momentary resting place'. In my hands, a copy of Mawqif by Pierre Joris, a book of poems and essays that I have translated into Spanish with Mario Domínguez Parra. Foreword by Ernesto Livon-Grosman, cover art by Nicole Peyrafitte. Published by La Otra (Mexico City), directed by José Angel Leyva." ��#65533; Joseph Mulligan


Breccia (Poems 1972-1986)

"Breccia is a showcase for poems from roughly twenty, sometimes rather fugitive, volumes, written and published during a time when Joris was living as a kind of postmodern nomad. One of the virtues of this in-gathering of work is that it makes clear the extent to which a sense of 'nomadism' - of being intensely in a place because one knows one has already left it - marks Joris' poetry.... The sense of immediacy in his work is striking. But the images of weather and shifting light and shade that give so many poems their climate of feeling, always play against a complex flow of conceptual activity and the possibility, but only the possibility, of archetypal permanence..." - Don Byrd

Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012)

"A magnificent multi-layered tome from the brilliant poet and translator whose erudition and deep engagement with the doings of humanitas are on full disply. From a lyrical bi-lingual ode to Kerouac through DIS/ASTEROILDRECK, we are drawn into a kinetic weave of world and language.....A book for the time, for all times, for its care, its passion, its urgent soundings." Anne Waldman


Paul Celan: Breathturn Into Timestead. The Collected Later Poetry

"I will make the outrageous assertion that Paul Celan reinvented poetry—or invented a new kind of poetry—or took poetry to a place where it had never been before. By definition, such work cannot be translated. Then along comes Pierre Joris, and by some mysterious process of linguistic alchemy, he has managed to translate hundreds of examples of this work, or at least to produce versions that embody the strangeness and power of the originals—and the grand adventure of Celan's late poems lives on in English." —Paul Auster

A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly

Long over-due, the present volume, A Voice Full of Cities, edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh, collects for the first time Kelly's essays, statements, & other writings on poetry & poetics, making available a vast array of difficult to obtain works. The editors' aim was to insure that, in Robert Kelly's own words, "the fifty years of thinking around the fifty years of making won't get lost, and making and thinking will be seen as one thing."