Review of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems (2004) by Pablo Picasso is a translation into English of Picasso’s poetic works, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, with an afterword by Michel Leiris. This translation reveals the brilliant far reaching metaphor that defines the esthetic reach of Pablo Picasso as an artistic mind, with the literary visualization of images enlivened by verbal syntax in an unpunctuated style that adds further complexity and richness to a continuous text.For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso’s original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, “Picasso’s entry into our own time.”
                                                                      Exact Change:
                                                                      Classics of Experimental Literature

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems exemplifies the decade of the 1930s, when Surrealism had become an international trend with a simple and classical style, and the early Cubism of Picasso had evolved into a more sophisticated poetics of language as an avant garde artform. Pablo Picasso conveys the vision of an oil painter and sculptor working with the concrete images which make up the daily inter(text)uality of the collective art consciousness.