Pierre Martory was born in Bayonne in 1920 and spent much of his childhood in Morocco.  He entered the School of Political Science in Paris in 1939, and in June 1940 escaped from Paris on the last train to leave before the Germans arrived.  After a brief stay in prison in Lyon he succeeded in joining the French Army in Morocco, and subsequently fought alongside the Allied forces in the Tunisian campaign.  After the war he suffered from depression and drifted through a series of jobs, eventually becoming the editor of Paris-Match.  His novel Phébus ou le beau mariage was published in 1953. For nine years from the mid-1950s Martory lived with the American poet John Ashbery in Paris. Ashbery’s translations of his poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review and The New Yorker.  Martory suffered a stroke in 1995 and died in 1998.