Monsieur Teste

“The fictional Teste—the word is Old French for “head”—is a spectral rationalist, a phenomenon of pure reason compelled only by inconvenient biology to put on trousers and sit at a café….Over all, it’s a pleasure to meet M. Teste, even if one feels that an effort to shake his hand would leave you grasping at air. — Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker

“This odd and powerful little book contains both a character sketch of a flawed man who lacks empathy and a study of power dynamics in a marriage. We get to know Teste mainly through the lens of his relationships….Charlotte Mandell’s prose is patient and lucid… she renders Valéry’s sentences in American English beautifully. ” Diane Mehta, The Wall Street Journal

“The young André Breton was so bowled over by Paul Valéry’s genre-defying novella…he learnt it by heart and described it as the poet’s supreme accomplishment…It’s easy to see why Breton was so taken—the novella is mis­chievous, strange and sinister.” —Shaun Whiteside, TLS

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Nominated twelve times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not begin writing full-time until he was nearly 50 years old, having worked secretarial and administrative jobs for the majority of his life. A hugely popular public speaker and intellectual figure during his day, Valéry is now best known for his intellectual diary, the Cahiers, and his poetry, which influenced contemporaries and later luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Charlotte Mandell is a French literary translator of more than 40 books, including Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child (co-translated with Jeffrey Zuckerman) and André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields. In April 2021 she received the honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel and a book-length poem, Context Collapse. His essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, and Poetry, among other publications. He lives in Berlin.

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