Liliane Giraudon’s Sphinx practically drips with the blood of its enemies. It’s delicately marbled, like good meat. One of experimental French writing’s most powerful and most undersung figures, Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. Working across prose and poetry—sometimes, too, between writing and drawing—Giraudon’s work is difficult to pin down. Enigmatic without ever being coy, Giraudon’s operational field is a mythic space, anchored in the classical past but firmly on the side of the living and our problems. “A dramatization of the present,” Giraudon writes in one of the poems, “Not History.” Lindsay Turner’s translation renders perfectly the excruciating intimacy of these hypnagogic, fabular poems.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. Giraudon’s books have primarily been published by France’s P.O.L. editions and range across genres; she has edited influential publications including Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If and collaborated widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Deluy, Jean-Jacques Viton, and others. Two of her prose books, Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh, were published in English by Sun & Moon Press (1992, 1994). In addition to Sphinx, Giraudon’s collection Love is Colder than the Lake is forthcoming in 2024, translated by Lindsay Turner and Sarah Riggs, from Nightboat books.