Upcoming book launch - a date for your diaries!

Hopscotch Translation invites you to a Zoom launch and celebration of Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup (translated by Ian Seed) and The Central Laboratory (translated by Alexander Dickow) (Wakefield Press, 2022):

Sunday, 15 October, 5 – 7.30 pm UK time.

MAX JACOB was born in Quimper in Brittany in 1876. His father was a tailor and the owner of an antique shop. Jacob left Quimper in 1894 to study law in Paris, but abandoned his studies two years later to become an art critic. In 1899 he decided to become a painter, supporting himself through a series of menial clerical jobs. When he met Picasso in 1901, the two became friends immediately, and Picasso expressed his admiration for Jacob’s poetry. From this time on, Jacob regarded poetry as his true vocation. He became a central figure in the Cubist movement of poets and painters, a mentor to Pierre Reverdy, and produced an abundance of literature, including novels and plays. After a religious vision in 1909, he eventually converted from being an ‘atheist Jew’ (Jacob’s own term) to Catholicism in 1915. This did not prevent him from being arrested by the Gestapo, despite possessing a certificate of baptism from the archbishop of Paris, and transported in February 1944 to Drancy, a transit camp for Jewish deportees, where he died three weeks later.

The Dice Cup (1917) is one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry.

The Central Laboratory (1921) is distinctly modern in its sensibility and utterly discordant with anything else that had been published before.

The reading with Alexander Dickow and Ian Seed will be hosted and facilitated by Vik Shirley. Free tickets will be available on Eventbrite, from 1st September.