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PoemsHenri Alain-FournierTranslated by Anthony Howell, Anthony Costello and Anita Marsh
Categories: 20th Century, French, Translation
Imprint: Fyfield Books Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. Nov 2016) 9781784103125 £9.99 £8.99 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Nov 2016) 9781784103132 £7.99 £7.19 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
We’ve seen such lovely summers!
But don’t you think this evening We should seal the château doors? It’s time to get going, get back, Enveloped in our overcoats, Down chestnut-guarded roads Rapidly shedding as we freeze In our ass-drawn carts and barouches Loaded with worries and little despairs, Our holidays over. It’s back to our cares.
Alain-Fournier’s poems, while relatively few, are one of the small pearls washed up in the maelstrom of early twentieth-century France. Best known for his novel Le Grand Meaulnes, a posthumous classic, Alain-Fournier was killed in battle in 1914. His poems suspend a pre-war French idyll of warm evenings and rained-on orchards, silk-banded straw hats, lamp-lit farmhouses – and young love reaching out ‘in the frightening dark, with timid fingers’. His lines fluoresce with the pain of memories which cannot be re-lived, and they combine elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Imagism. The sun is an ambivalent force in these poetic narratives, which transform themselves as if they were dreams. The music of Debussy, the writings of Laforgue, and the paintings of Renoir can also be detected under the surface of Alain-Fournier’s verse, which is provided here in a comprehensive English translation for the first time.
'There is an attractive insouciance in the proceeding, a freshness and vitality in the result, and a breath of romantic yearning (Sehnsucht) and the whole, which are characteristic of the poet and make up a large part of the enchantment of his youthful world.'
D.M De Silva, Poetry Salzburg 'The atmospherics of night and rain do not suggest a desolating personal loss in the area either of love or money; they have a quality of the magical and evoke unmistakably the enchanted world of Pelléas et Mélisande.' D. M De Silva, Poetry Salzburg |
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