Stroke by Stroke

Stroke by Stroke is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux’s most suggestive texts, Stroke by Stroke (Par des traits, 1984) and Grasp (Saisir, 1979), written towards the end of his life. Michaux’s ideogrammic ink drawings accompany his poetic explorations of animals, humans, and the origins of language. This series of verbal and pictorial gestures is at once explosive and contemplative. Michaux emerges at his most Zen."I first encountered Michaux’s astonishing work in Stroke By Stroke, a physically and conceptually beautiful little book . . . Reading Stroke By Stroke, I felt invited to travel “toward greater ungraspability”—and in our uncertain times, Michaux’s ease with that is deeply reassuring." - Martha Cooley, The CommonHenry Michaux is hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience – the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-today, minute-to-minute living. —John Ashbery

Michaux is the poet laureate of our insomnia. —The New York Times Book Review Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things. —Andre Gide

Michaux travels via his languages: lines, words, colors, silences, rhythms. And he does not hesitate to break the back of a word...In order to arrive: where? At that nowhere that is here, there, and everywhere. —Octavio PazHenri Michaux (1899-1994) was born in Namur, Belgium. His travels throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa inspired his first two books, Ecuador and A Barbarian in Asia. In 1948, after the death of his wife, he devoted himself increasingly to his distinctive calligraphic ink drawings. Averse to publicity of any sort, in 1965 he refused the French Grand Prix National des Lettres. Michaux’s other works in English translation include Emergences-Resurgences (Skira, 2001), Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology (California, 1997), Tent Posts (Sun and Moon, 1997), and A Barbarian in Asia (New Directions, 1986).

Richard Sieburth’s translations include Georg Bu?chner’s Lenz, Friedrich Holderlin’s Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings, Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences, Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem’s The Fullness of Time. His English edition of the Nerval won the 2000 PEN/ Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Sceve’s Délie was a finalist for the PENTranslation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.As for living creatures and things, who has not wished to get a fuller, better, different grasp on them, not with words, not with phonemes or onomatopoeias, but with graphic signs?
Who has not wished at some point to create an abecedarium, a bestiary, or even an entire vocabulary, from which the verbal would be entirely excluded?
What if I tried my hand at it once again, opening myself in earnest to the creatures of the seen world?