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Collected French Translations: Poetry

The first volume of a momentous two-volume gathering of translations by America’s greatest living poet represents Ashbery’s lifelong engagement with French poetry. He spent almost a decade in France from 1955, during which he worked as an art critic in Paris and was close to the poet Pierre Martory. His versions of Martory’s poems (published by Carcanet as The Landscapist) were a 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; a selection of them appears here. His other poetry translations include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Arthur Cravan, Francis Ponge, Paul Éluard and André Breton, and France’s greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. The development of modern French poetry — by way of the movements of Romanticism, Symbolism, Dadaism and Surrealism — emerges through Ashbery’s chronology. Presenting 149 poems by twenty-one poets, this edition also features a sampler of Ashbery’s masterly translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, published to acclaim in 2011. In Ashbery this classic text found a translator whose virtuosic originality brought Rimbaud’s visions to life in English.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 320
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781847772343
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 2014