Collected French Translations: Poetry

Collected French Translations: Poetry by Ashbery, John. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780374258023.

An essential, vibrant collection of masterful translations by one of the finest poets at work today Collected French Translations: Poetry,half of a long-awaited two-volume collection of translations by Americas foremost living poet, surveys John Ashberys lifelong love of French poetry. Beginning in 1955, Ashbery spent nearly a decade in France, working as an art critic in Paris and forming a relationship with the poet Pierre Martory. His translations of Martorys poems, featured here, were collected in The Landscapist, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation in 2008 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. In this volume, Ashbery presents a wide selection of Frances finest poets: Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Éluard, and its greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. A rich array of 171 poems by twenty-four poets, this bilingual volume also features a selection from Ashberys masterly translation of Rimbauds Illuminations. The development of modern French poetry emerges through Ashberys chronology, as does the depth of French influences on his iconoclastic career and the poets of the New York School. Collected together for the first time, Ashberys translations represent decades of remarkable work from the writer hailed by Harold Bloom as a part of the "American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane."