(Dis-]orient yourself toward the coming 'pataphysico-symbolico-hermetico-bohemian year with a new, comedically on-point translation of Alfred Jarry & Co's 1899 annual, by the British Post-NeoAbsurdist Amy Oliver. Père Ubu's Almanac was Jarry's answer to the annually published almanac, a format which provided ordinary people with the forecasts that helped them tend their crops, fish their waters and mark their religious holidays for centuries. Offering a unique and irreverent insight into the cultural and political landscape of Paris on the cusp of the 20th century, Ubu's Almanac was created by Jarry in 1898 along with some friends, artistic contemporaries and colleagues at the Mercure de France, including Claude Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard (who created the illustrations), Rachilde, Pierre Quillard, André-Ferdinand Hérold and Marcel Collière, while they summered together in a riverside house in Corbeil. It's a multidimensional collage of found text, in-jokes, puns and contemporary cultural references, written during the height of the political scandal that would come to be known as the Dreyfus Affair.The book's original formatting and layout, a thorough parody and détourne of the positivist Almanacs that permeated the 19th Century, has been reproduced as closely as possible.

アルフレッド・ジャリが仕掛けるこの「暦」は、既存の秩序への鮮やかな宣戦布告です。世紀末パリの混沌を背景に、強欲なウブ親父の視点から描かれる虚無と諧謔は、読者の理性を心地よく裏切ります。コラージュ手法を駆使し、芸術と俗悪を綯い交ぜにする筆致は、後にシュルレアリスムへと繋がる「パタフィジック（形而超学）」の真髄を体現しており、現代の表現者にとっても測り知れない刺激に満ちています。 ボナールの挿絵と響き合うテキストは、当時の実証主義を嘲笑い、現実を「遊戯」として解体します。これは単なる書物ではなく、ページを捲るたびに意識が揺さぶられる、過激で官能的な芸術体験そのもの。ドレフュス事件という時代の重圧さえも笑い飛ばす自由な精神は、常識という重力から解放されたい読者へ、至高の毒薬として強烈な輝きを放ち続けています。