Achilles Once Again Visits the Republic of Korea – Now Live on Amazon!

By Counselor Books on Nov 24, 2019, 21:50 • ( 0 )

Achilles Once Again Visits the Republic of Korea: An Unconventional Translation of Homer’s Iliad by Michael Klauke is now available on Amazon in paperback!

This 389-page masterpiece of experimental poetry makes a delightful gift for lovers of words―it is remarkably difficult to put down. Open it to any page and enjoy the novel phrases and images created by Klauke and his algorithm. The book is beautifully designed by Doug Clouse and features a foreword by Craig Dworkin.

Michael Klauke is a visual artist and experimental writer who lives in North Carolina. His lifelong love of words is the inspiration for both his art and his writing. Some of Klauke’s earlier writing projects include the artist’s book ad infinitum, published by Nexus Press in Atlanta in 1987, and “This Ervin,” published by the Western Humanities Review in 2017. He has had solo exhibitions of his art at numerous venues including the Mint Museum of Art, The National Humanities Center, and the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh. His work is in the collections of the Mint Museum of Art, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. His visual art can be seen at his website, michaelklauke.com.

Achilles Once Again Visits the Republic of Korea is an epic poem of unexpected language and radical transformation, created by using an online translation program to filter a traditional translation of the Iliad through other languages and then back to English. The results are both surprising and humorous.

Less a new English version of Homer’s seminal work than a grand-scale example of how modern technology can be manipulated for creative ends, this groundbreaking book has the power to both amuse and occasionally amaze. Never-seen phrases abound in virtually every stanza, giving readers an almost endless supply of opportunities to laugh, ponder, and marvel at the ways in which language can be manipulated and how their own imagination can be set free to explore new and unique avenues of thought.

Doug Clouse is a graphic designer (The Graphics Office), author, and Chairman of the Board of the Type Directors Club. Craig Dworkin is the author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (Fordham University Press); No Medium (MIT Press); and Reading the Illegible (Northwestern University Press). He teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah and serves as Senior Founding Editor to Eclipse (eclipsearchive.org).