In this bilingual anthology, editor and translator Louis Simpson selects those masterpieces of French poetry that formed the taste of generations of readers throughout the world. Here are the "moderns" of 1848, the Symbolist poets of the turn of the century, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists who flourished in the 1930s. Also included are biographies of the poets and descriptions of main literary movements.
Simpson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, has edited Modern Poets of France for the English-speaking reader who wants readable and accurate translations of works by such great poets as Desbordes-Valmore, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallerme, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Desnos. The translations are models of what translations should be, always keeping the original in sight,m not altering the author's meaning, form, or style in any important way. "But," Simpson reminds us in his Preface, "poems are written with imagination and translations have to be too."
