The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

by Mary Ann Caws (Editor)

Not since the publication of Paul Auster's The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1984) has there been a significant and widely read anthology of modern French poetry in the English-speaking world. Here for the first time is a comprehensive bilingual representation of French poetic achievement in the twentieth century, from the turn-of-the-century poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire to the high modernist art of Samuel Beckett to the contemporary verse of scourge Michel Houellebecq. Many of the English translations (on facing pages) are justly celebrated, composed by eminent figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery; many others are new and have been commissioned for this book. Distinguished scholar and editor Mary Ann Caws has chosen work by more than 100 poets. Her deliberately extensive, international selection includes work by Francophone poets, by writers better known for accomplishments in other genres (novelists, songwriters, performance artists), and by many more female poets than have typically been represented in past anthologies of modern French poetry. The editor has opted for a chronological organisation that highlights six crucial pressur

Genres: Poetry, France, Anthologies, French Literature, Literature

704 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 2004

About the author

Mary Ann Caws is an American author, translator, art historian and literary critic.
She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the film faculty. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell. She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabès. She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies including Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Surrealism, and the Yale Anthology of 20th-Century French Poetry. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Among the positions she has held are President, Association for Study of Dada and Surrealism, 1971–75 and President, Modern Language Association of America, 1983, Academy of Literary Studies, 1984–85, and the American Comparative Literature Association, 1989-91.
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
In October 2004, she published her autobiography, To the Boathouse: a Memoir (University Alabama Press), and in November 2008, a cookbook memoir: Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France (Pegasus Books).
She was married to Peter Caws and is the mother of Hilary Caws-Elwitt and of Matthew Caws, lead singer of the band Nada Surf. She is married to Dr. Boyce Bennett; they live in New York City.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve decorated the day with the tattoos of my dreams
my face has seen my other face
I’ve not heard the voice calling me
the hand seeking me hasn’t found me
I’ve been born several times from each star
I’ve died as often from the sun of days
I’ve taken early boats to nowhere

—Amina Saïd, from “Path of Light”

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve decorated the day with the tattoos of my dreams
my face has seen my other face
I’ve not heard the voice calling me
the hand seeking me hasn’t found me
I’ve been born several times from each star
I’ve died as often from the sun of days
I’ve taken early boats to nowhere
[...]
I’ve lived in the sunset the sunrise and the space of winds
I was this stranger accompanied by the evening
twice a stranger between north and south
I’ve engraved sad birds on gray stones
I’ve drawn these stones and lived in them
I’ve constructed rafts where there were no oceans
I’ve raised tents where there were no deserts
caravans have led me toward an eastern dream
my calligraphies have traveled on the back of clouds
I remembered the snow of almond trees
I’ve followed the airy path of birds
up to the lunar mount at the eiderdowns of births
I’ve learned and forgotten all the languages of earth
[...]
I’ve drunk on some evenings at the flask of forgetting
I’ve sought my star in the bed of stars
I’ve kept your love in the hollow of my palm
I’ve woven a carpet with the wool of memory
I’ve unfolded the world under the arch of beginnings
I’ve bandaged the twilight’s wounds
I’ve put my seasons in sheaves to o√er them to life
I’ve counted the trees separating you from me
we were two on this earth we there alone
I have tightened a word belt around my waist
covered with a winding sheet the illusion of mirrors
cultivated silence like a rare plant
gleam after gleam I have deciphered the night
death has courted me for a time
[...]
I’ve called—only silence paid any heed
[...]
I’ve crossed the mirror of the poem and it has crossed me
I’ve entrusted myself to the flash of the word

—Amina Saïd, from “Path of Light,”

[حسن · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the Road to San Romano
André Breton

Poetry is made in a bed like love
Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things
Poetry is made in the woods
It has the space it needs
Not this one but the other whose form is lent it by
The eye of the kite
The dew on a horsetail
The memory of a bottle frosted over on a
silver tray
A tall rod of tourmaline on the sea
And the road of the mental adventure
That climbs abruptly
One stop and bushes cover it instantly
That isn’t to be shouted on the rooftops
It’s improper to leave the door open
Or to summon witnesses
The shoals of fish the hedges of titmice
The rails at the entrance of a great station
The reflections of both riverbanks
The crevices in the bread
The bubbles of the stream
The days of the calendar
The St John’s wort
The acts of love and poetry
Are incompatible
With reading the newspaper aloud
The meaning of the sunbeam
The blue light between the hatchet blows
The bat’s thread shaped like a heart or a hoopnet The beavers’ tails beating in time
The diligence of the flash
The casting of candy from the old stairs
The avalanche
The room of marvels
No dear sirs it isn’t the eighth
Chamber
Nor the vapours of the roomful some
Sunday evening
The figures danced transparent above the pools
The outline on the wall of a woman’s body at daggerthrow
The bright spirals of smoke
The curls of your hair
The curve of the Philippine sponge
The swaying of the coral snake
The ivy entrance in the ruins
It has all the time ahead
The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh
As long as it lasts
Shuts out any glimpse of the misery of the world
***

What Would I Do
Samuel Beckett

what would I do without this world faceless incurious where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust
what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before peering out of my deadlight looking for another wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness
***

I Want to Sleep with You
Joyce Mansour

I want to sleep with you side by side
Our hair intertwined
Our sexes joined
With your mouth for a pillow.
I want to sleep with you back to back
With no breath to part us
No words to distract us
No eyes to lie to us
With no clothes on.
To sleep with you breast to breast
Tense and sweating
Shining with a thousand quivers
Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia
Stretched out on your shadow
Hammered by your tongue
To die in a rabbit’s rotting teeth
Happy.
***

At Christmas
Emmanuel Hocquard

III
Viviane is Viviane, yes.
Tautology does not say all but yes.
Yes and all are not equivalents.
Every yes fills the space of language, which for all that does not form a whole.
One would not obtain a sum by adding up these yeses.
What if we subtracted all from our vocabulary.
Those wolves do not sing in chorus.
The space filled by their scraps of voices is a broken space.
Heaps of little spaces in juxtaposition
sing
around the points.
***

My Dance
Blaise Cendrars

Plato does not grant city rights to the poet Wandering Jew
Metaphysical Don Juan
Friends, close ones
You don’t have customs anymore and no new habits yet We must be free of the tyranny of magazines
Literature
Poor life
Misplaced pride
Mask
Woman, the dance Nietzsche wanted to teach us to dance Woman
But irony?
Continual coming and going Procuring in the street
All men, all countries
And so you are no longer a burden It’s like you’re not there anymore . . .
I am a gentleman who in fabulous express trains crosses the same old Europe and gazes disheartened from the doorway
The landscape doesn’t interest me anymore But the dance of the landscape
The dance of the landscape Dance-landscape
Paritatitata I all-turn
***

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 3 out of 5]

1
1897–1915:
Symbolism, Post-Symbolism, Cubism,
Simultanism
Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau,
Léon-Paul Fargue, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Valéry Larbaud,
Saint-John Perse, Pablo Picasso, Catherine Pozzi, Pierre Reverdy, Saint-
Pol Roux, Victor Segalen, Jules Supervielle, Paul Valéry, Renée Vivien

2

1916–1930:
Dada and the Heroic Period of
Surrealism

Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett,
Andrée Breton, Claude Cahun, Malcolm de Chazal, Robert Desnos,
Paul Éluard, Jean Follain, Greta Knutson, Michel Leiris, Henri
Michaux, Benjamin PeÅLret, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert, Raymond
Queneau, LeÅLopold SeÅLdar Senghor, Philippe Soupault, Jean Tardieu,
Tristan Tzara, Marguerite Yourcenar


3
1931–1945:
Prewar and War Poetry
Claude de Burine, Aimé Césaire, ReneÅL Char, Andrée Chédid, Léon-
Gontran Damas, René Daumal, Michel Deguy, ReneÅL Depestre,
Mohammed Dib, Louis-ReneÅL des Forêts, Andrée Frénaud, Jean
Grosjean, Euge`ne Guillevic, Anne Hébert, Radovan Ivsic, Edmond
Jabe`s, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Gherasim Luca, Dora Maar, Joyce
Mansour, Meret Oppenheim, Valentine Penrose, Gise`le Prassinos,
Boris Vian

4
1946–1966:
The Death of André Breton, the
Beginning of L’Éphémère
Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet, Bernard Collin, Jacques Dupin,
Jacques Garelli, Lorand Gaspar, Édouard Glissant, Philippe Jaccottet,
Claire Lejeune, Claire Malroux, Robert Marteau, Abdelwahab Meddeb,
Gaston Miron, Bernard Noël, Anne Perrier, Anne Portugal, Jacques
Réda, Jude SteÅLfan, Salah Stétié

5
1967–1980:
The Explosion of the Next Generation

Anne-Marie Albiach, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Silvia Baron Supervielle,
Martine Broda, Nicole Brossard, Danielle Collobert, Claude Esteban,
Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, Michelle Grangaud, Emmanuel
Hocquard, Hédi Kaddour, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Abdellatif Laa^bi,
Annie Le Brun, Marcelin Pleynet, Jacqueline Risset, Jacques Roubaud,
Paul de Roux, Claude Royet-Journoud, Habib Tengour, Franck
Venaille

6
1981–2002:
Young Poetry at the End of the
Millennium
Pierre AlfeÅLri, Tahar Bekri, Olivier Cadiot, Jean Frémon, Liliane
Giraudon, Guy Go√ette, Michel Houellebecq, Franck André Jamme,
Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Robert Melancon, Pascalle Monnier, Nathalie
Quintane, Valérie-Catherine Richez, Amina Saïd, Christophe Tarkos,
André Velter

[Wilum Pugmire]

I am writing a new collection of Sesqua Valley stories, BOHEMIANS OF SESQUA VALLEY, and I want it to wear a taint of French decadence. So I am returning to French works of symbolism and such, and of course Wilde's Salome will figure in the book as well. This is the only collection of French poetry that I have read (I have just ordered the Penguin Classics anthology of a similar theme), and I found it quite intoxicating. Edited by a woman, Mary Ann Caws, it comes to over 600 pages of verse. Highly recommended.

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a must have for serious poetry readers.
It is one of the best poetry anthologies I have ever read. For me, what makes this collection of poetry superb is the vast range of poetry that this anthology consists of. I often read poetry by American poets. This book was a refreshing change. Every morning for seven months I read a selection from this book. You will enjoy this book.

[R.L. Swihart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good read. Found some new poets to explore more in depth (e.g., Edmond Jabbes), found plenty to tacitly pass on.