Preversities

Jacques Prévert (1900-1977) was one of France's most beloved poets and an internationally renowned screenwriter. An active participant in the surrealist movement he was also a member of the Rue du Chateau group, along with Raymond Queneau and Marcel Duchamp. His poetry book Paroles sold over 500,000 copies, an unheard-of number for a poetry book at the time. His poems are taught widely in France and included in all major anthologies of 20th-century French poetry. Many of his poems have been set to music and performed by vocalists from Edith Piaf to Joan Baez. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro, who has caught, and managed to convey into English, the wit, wordplay, and puns that Prévert revelled in, this comprehensive bilingual anthology of Prevert's poems spans the length of his writing career.

"Norman Shapiro's translations, for this reader, are akin to the enjoyment of manipulating a kaleidoscope. All the fragments of the original manage to end up in the translation, but placed, economically and gracefully, differently. The poems themselves invariably please, but the relation between the original and the translation frequently dazzles. Which is to say that the reader of this dual-language volume is superlatively well-placed to intuit what Andre Breton may have meant when he said that Jacques Prevert was the only man he could not bear to see die."—Jeffrey Mehlnnan, from his Introduction

"Shapiro's skills, and certainly his prolific output, as a translator of French poetry are unsurpassed in our time"—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A wonderfully lively and resourceful translator who knows how to put French wit and charm into English."—Richard Wilbur

Norman R. Shapiro is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University and is currently Writer in Residence at Adams House, Harvard University. His many published volumes span the centuries, medieval to modern, and the genres: poetry, novel, and theatre.