Also Translated by Barbara Wright

Ubu Roi (Alfred Jarry)

The Bark Tree (Raymond Queneau)
The Flight of Icarus (Raymond Queneau)
The Sunday of Life (Raymond Queneau)

Translated from the French by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright,
with an introduction by Barbara Wright.

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

Copyright© 1964, 1977 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Extracts from Roger Shattuck’s “Introduction” to the Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (Copyright © 1965 by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor) are reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

An earlier version of this translation appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 18 (1964). The present edition was first published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 426 in 1977

Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Jarry, Alfred, 1873-1907.

The supermale = (Le surmâle).

(A New Directions Book)

I. Title.

PZ3.J297SU7 [PQ2619.A65] 843.8 76-45646

ISBN 0-8112-0632-7

ISBN 0-8112-0633-5 pbk.

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

333 Sixth Avenue, New York 10014

CONTENTS

Introduction by Barbara Wright

The Supermale

The Highest Bidder

His Heart Was Neither on the Right nor on the Left

It’s a Female, but a Very Strong One

A Little Slip of a Girl

The Ten-Thousand-Mile Race

The Alibi

Ladies Only

The Ovum

The Indian So Celebrated by Theophrastus

Who Art Thou, Human Creature?

And More

O Sweetest Nightingale

The Discovery of Woman

The Love Machine

Introduction by Barbara Wright

INTRODUCTION

Alfred Jarry is still, outside France, mainly known as the author of the “scandalous” play Ubu Roi, which was probably the first example of the “Theater of the Absurd.” It was indeed Ubu that shot Jarry, at the age of twenty-three, into instant notoriety in the fin-de-siecle “belle époque” Paris of 1896, but Ubu represents only one aspect of his multifarious talents.