Clipped from http://www.kwls.org/lit/kwls_blog/
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Click here to view the Epithalamium
The Epithalamium of Harry Mathews
Mathews and his wife Marie Chaix divide their time between France and Key West, where, from 2001-'04, he served as a member of our board of directors along with Irving Weinman. In 1998, Mathews, Chaix, and others celebrated the Key West marriage of Weinman to poet Judith Kazantzis. To honor their union, Mathews turned toward Perec's Oulipian re-imagining of the Epithalamium, a traditional poetic form which celebrates bride and groom. In Perec's version, the basic rule is that the letters used are restricted to those of the names of the betrothed. In Mathews' 5-part Epithalamium, a further refinement was added, limiting the letters of the first section to those of the bride's name, the second to those of the groom's, alternating until the final section, where the letters of both names are freely mixed. It sounds complicated, and is, especially when you consider the strict alphabet of this bride, j-u-d-i-t-h-k-a-z-a-n-s, and this groom, i-r-v-n-g-w-e-n-m-a. But what results is a gorgeous rendering of two distinct, isolate, fully-composed entities, finally coming together in a union richer than the sums of each. It is a marriage of language, in other words, to celebrate a marriage of friends.
Until now, Harry Mathews's Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman, with collages by Marie Chaix, has been available only to those friends who attended the wedding of Judith and Irving on February 22, 1998, and received one of the ninety-three copies printed by the Grenfell Press. By special arrangement with Mathews and Chaix, we have created a digital version of the Epithalamium, following the design of the original. Click here to view the Epithalamium as a series of images in a pop-up window. Click here to download a .pdf of the Epithalamium, which will allow you to magnify text size as desired.
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