The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: With Translations by American and British Poets

Vintage, the publisher, should feel deep, dark, spooky shame for letting this remarkable book go out of print. The reviewer below is misguided in his or her belief that there are more than a few clunkers among the translations: hogwash. Wilbur's rendition of "Le Pont Mirabeau" is an exceptionally musical version of an exceptionally musical poem, and approximates beautifully the Whistleresque mood. To critique Pound's translation is like saying "Damn the Moon, it's full of holes." Sure, but its the Moon. On the whole, this book gets it right, offering an interesting selection of poets and translators (just as there is more than one kind of poet, so too are there different, and equally valid, forms of translation). Seek it out till Bertlesman come to their multinational senses.

Paul Auster chose his poems well, and the bilingual presentation, format, and ordering of the poets are all clear and easy to follow. It's wonderful to have this access to modern French poetry in English. There are two problems, however: First, there are hardly any women poets (I think 1 out of 50 - the unrelenting masculine viewpoint gets tedious, like being trapped in a cigar-smoke-filled men's room). And second, some of the translations are graceless and inaccurate. Mr. Auster's secondary goal was to choose among already-existing translations by American and British poets. Many of these ruin the mood, parallelisms and imagery of the poems. For instance, Apollinaire's "Mirabeau Bridge" is tortured into English rhyme, destroying all subtlety. Milosz's "November Symphony" has had a meaningless name change to "Strophes" by Ezra Pound, who, if he was going to re-name it, should have called it "Truncations", since he seems to have gotten tired and omitted the last third of the poem. All in all, though, I'm very pleased to have it.