Posts tagged Stefan Themerson
No one reads Stefan Themerson, novelist, filmmaker, inventor of semantic poetry, and perhaps most significantly, publisher.
Through his press, Gaberbocchus (the name is a latinized version of Jabberwocky), he introduced to the English-reading world translations of works now considered canonical, including Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi, Raymond Queaneau’s Exercises in Style, and Cozette de Charmoy’s above-pictured “collage novel,” The True Life of Sweeney Todd.
Bertrand Russell admiringly summed up Themerson’s own work as being “nearly as mad as the world.” The plot of The Mystery of the Sardine, a meandering detective story that begins with an exploding poodle and includes among its cast of characters a 12-year old author (of a book titled Euclid Was an Ass) and a bureaucrat called the Minister of Imponderabilia, suggests that Russell was not far off in his pithy assessment.
For more, see:
- Nicholas Wadley’s essay on “Reading Stefan Themerson” in Context
- The Stefan Themerson Archive (from which the image was taken)
- Exact Change publishes Themerson’s Bayamus and Cardinal Pölätüo
- Dalkey Archive publishes three of his novels
