Catalogue 2014: french poetry in translation

french, québécois & francophonepoetry in translation

catalogue 2014

Emile Verhaeren

POEMStranslated by Will Stone, introduction by Patrick McGuinness

Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), who helped to define the Symbolist move-ment, is one of Belgium’s most venerated and admired francophone poets. Dubbed the ‘European Walt Whitman’, he was a pro-European idealist whose poetry explores his all-consuming notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and new technology could combine to produce a more progressive humanity, a hope ignominiously swept away by the industrial brutality of the First World War.

This sympathetic modern translation by Will Stone at last allows the English-speaking world to return to, and reappraise, a major poet whose influence was felt throughout European literary circles during his life-time.

Arc Classic Translations

French / English bilingual£10.99 paperback ISBN: 978-1906514-69-2

£13.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1906570-09-5

10% discount and free P&P in the UK from www.arcpublications.co.ukalso available in all major ebook formats(bulk) orders: [email protected] | 01706 812338

Valérie Rouzeau

TALKING VROUZtranslated by Susan Wicks

Selected from Rouzeau’s most recent collections, Quand Je Me Deux (2009) and Vrouz (2012), these poems present a language that is a hybrid of liberties and constraints – omissions, grammatical contractions, col-loquialisms and archaisms, wordplay, puns, childspeak, exploded cliché and the heightened awareness of a poetic tradition – a language that Susan Wicks recreates in all its richness and quirkiness in her brilliant translation.

Rouzeau’s first collection from Arc, Cold Spring in Winter, also trans-lated by Susan Wicks, was short-listed for a number of prizes including the 2010 International Griffin Prize for Poetry, and Susan Wicks won the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize in 2010 for her translation of this work.

Arc Translations


£13.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1908376-17-6


Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Hélène Dorion

SEIZING:PLACEStranslated and introduced by Patrick McGuinness

Hélène Dorion is one of Quebec’s most outstanding and decorated po-ets. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Prix Mal-larmé and numerous other Canadian and international prizes, she is a prolific writer, not only of poetry but also fiction, essays and artist’s books.

Seizing:Places is perhaps Dorion’s most ambitious work so far. Con-sisting of five sequences – ‘seizing’ cities, shadows, mirrors, windows and faces – this collection is a distillation of perception, memory and experience.

This is a work of big themes and vision which Patrick McGuinness’s impeccable translation makes available to the English-language reader in all its subtlety of language and intensity of expression.

Arc Translations


£12.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1906570-17-0


poets from French-speaking Africa & the Arab world

THE PARLEY TREEedited, translated and introduced by Patrick Williamson

The Parley Tree gives a glimpse of some of the most representative voices of the poetic movements and generations in the francophone countries of the whole continent of Africa, and as such, seeks to do away with the divisions that traditionally separate North Africa from Sub-Saharan Africa, and the African world from the Arab world.

Poetry is one of the major forms of literary expression in these re-gions, and the French-language poetry of the countries included in this anthology is clearly only one dimension of an overall poetic landscape shared with other national languages, but it is a dimension that is of great literary merit and worthy of the international acclaim it has at-tracted. The Parley Tree offers an insight into a whole world that might otherwise have remained closed off to English-language readers.

Anthologies in Translation


10% discount and free P&P in the UK from www.arcpublications.co.uk(bulk) orders: [email protected] | 01706 812338

François Jacqmin

THE BOOK OF THE SNOWtranslated by Philip Mosley, introduced by Clive Scott

An intriguing set of short, deceptively simple poems, The Book of the Snow meditates on our relation to the austere beauty and elemental power of the midwinter scene. It is also a subtle, witty, occasionally sav-age critique of our philosophical and artistic complacency. While pre-tending to literary defeatism, François Jacqmin captivates us with the deft touch of an accomplished poet.

Philip Mosley’s beautifully modulated translation of the last col-lection to be published in the poet’s lifetime, only two years before his death in 1992, makes available to English-language readers for the first time the work of one of Belgium’s foremost francophone poets of the twentieth century.

Visible Poets


£13.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1906570-02-6


Valérie Rouzeau

COLD SPRING IN WINTERtranslated by Susan Wicks, introduction by Stephen Romer

When Valérie Rouzeau’s first poem sequence was published in France under the title Pas Revoir, it met with immediate critical acclaim. These poems are an urgent, stammered lament for her dead father, a scrap-merchant, in which the poet’s adult voice and that of the little girl she used to be combine in an extraordinary blend of baby-talk, youthful slang, coinages and puns – a breathless delivery of tremendous power.

The influential poet and critic André Velter has described Rouzeau’s poetry as ‘violent in its capacity to exalt and disturb’. This quality comes to the fore in Susan Wicks’s remarkable translation, the excellence and ingenuity of which, in Stephen Romer’s words at the conclusion of his introduction to this volume, ‘make good the transposition of this pure and singular voice into English’.

Visible Poets


£12.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1904614-59-3


Maurice Carême

DEFYING FATEtranslated by Christopher Pilling, introduction by Martin Sorrell

Maurice Carême, along with Emile Verhaeren, is regarded as one of Bel-gium’s master poets. Poems of his were set by Poulenc and Milhaud, and have been translated into many languages to feature in school antholo-gies.

The present volume was published posthumously in 1987, and con-sists of poems that were finished, but had not been published, at the time of the poet’s death nine years earlier.

Carême’s poetry is marked by its fluency and ease of access; it is a poetry of shared emotion and aesthetic satisfaction that is easy to iden-tify with. Now, in Christopher Pilling’s masterly translation, an English readership has a chance to become better acquainted with this towering figure of Belgian literature.

Visible Poets


£12.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1904614-97-5

10% discount and free P&P in the UK from www.arcpublications.co.ukbulk orders: [email protected] | 01706 812338

Anise Koltz

AT THE EDGE OF NIGHTtranslated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, introduced by Caroline Price

At the Edge of Night, a selection from four recent collections by Anise Koltz, brings the work of Luxembourg’s best-known poet to the atten-tion of the English-speaking literary world for the first time.

Written in Koltz’s prolific seventh decade, these brief poems – short, unpunctuated lines, clearly separated stanzas, direct language – are both personal and universal. These poems pulse with anger, directed at the poet herself and her personal circumstances, at life, the world and God.

Koltz originally wrote in German but switched to French which her translator, Anne-Marie Glasheen, believes gives her work some of its ar-tistic power: “This is poetry unlike any I have come across before. It feels utterly European… it speaks to the reader directly, jumping cultural barriers. It is poetry which is knife-sharp, clear and dazzling.”

Visible Poets


£12.99 hardback ISBN: 978-1906570-03-3


Jean Cassou

33 SONNETS OF THE RESISTANCE

translated by Timothy Adès, introduced by Alistair Elliot, original introduction by Louis Aragon

Jean Cassou wrote the thirty-three sonnets which Aragon admired so much and which form the first part of this collection in a Vichy prison between December 1941 and February 1942, in the dark, half a sonnet per night, committed to memory and only written down when a few days before his provisional release he was allowed some books, a pencil and some sheets of paper.

Through his fine and thoughtful translation of these sonnets and a selection of Cassou’s later poems, Timothy Adès gives us the opportu-nity of discovering an unfamiliar – and now historical – poetic voice.

Visible Poets



Claude de Burine

WORDS HAVE FROZEN OVER

translated by Martin Sorrell, introduced by Susan Wicks

In her introduction to Words Have Frozen Over, Susan Wicks writes, “It’s de Burine’s images that are the first thing that compels an English-speaking reader of these strange, passionate poems. Her poetry is built almost entirely on imagery, where metaphor is poetic structure, and the freedom of the vision itself becomes a source of meaning. The legacy of the Surrealists is immediately apparent.”

This is a remarkable and haunting collection from a writer described by the Rimbaud Review in 1998 as “the greatest female poetic voice of our time”. Martin Sorrell’s impeccable translation in every way serves to underline this claim.

Visible Poets



Arc Publications publishes contemporary poetry from new and established writers from the UK and abroad, specialising in the work of international poets writing in English and the work of overseas poets in translation.

www.arcpublications.co.uk@Arc_Poetry

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Catalogue 2014: french poetry in translation