This is part 4 of 4 posts. For details about the physical aspect of this book and the original premise, go to the first post, here. 2nd post. 3rd post.
Essentially, this is an on-line recreation of a book consisting of three sets of postcards revolving around a set of short writings by Henri Michaux.
The first set has on one side (the ‘text’ side of a traditional postcard) the official, published translated text. On the other side of each is a collage image inspired by the text.
The second set has on one side the original French; I don’t speak or read French, so I’ve picked out the words that make visual sense as an English speaker and highlighted them. The other side has an English translation of the French, generated by Babelfish, an internet translation program. It’s a weird machine translation, very literal and sometimes completely missing the point.
The third set is highly personal. The images are drawn using ink, gouache and gold paint and then partially erased. The text is hand-written, using my own experiences, and echoing Michaux’s text without imitating it. These were written in 2000, four years before I thought about blogging — but you can see why I took to blogging so happily.
There are 12 pieces of writing in ‘I am writing to you from a far-off country’. I have arranged all the postcards into twelve sections, so that you can see the sets in the way they were meant to be viewed. The second batch, postcards II-IV are below, showing fronts and backs. If you like them and wish to read them all, they are divided over four blog posts: I, II-IV, V-VIII, IX-XII.
IX
X
XI
XII
