Gianluca Rizzo writes through a classic of world literature, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, looking to the past for the right words to implicate the present. It is a daring experiment that disrupts, displaces, recontextualizes, and yet falls short of a proper betrayal. The slippery French prose is dragged through Italian and English as if to make a point: translation is a creative pursuit, the most loving kind of reading, an antidote to the bloated narcissism that afflicts us all, a respite from our contemporaries, a promontory where the future can be met on equal footing.  The accompanying visual poems run a separate but parallel course, from the elegance of Venetian Renaissance printing to the brute force of artificial intelligence.