Jean Follain

Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.

This title is shortlisted for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2011. The poetry of Jean Follain (1903-1971) is increasingly seen, by poets and critics in France and by his foreign admirers, as central to French poetry's change of course after Surrealism. The writer Henri Thomas spoke of Follain as a poet qui parle d'autre 'chose', who speaks of things outside himself; he admired his freedom from rhetoric. Follain's short, down-to-earth, subtle poems, many of which set out to preserve the lost rural world of his pre-war Norman childhood, have influenced a new generation of French poets. To anyone who still believes that modern French poetry is abstruse and over-cerebral, Follain's memorable poems are the answer. Christopher Middleton, the distinguished poet and translator, has chosen poems spanning Follain's entire writing life, and has written an illuminating introduction to his elegant translations.

Throughout WWII, French poet Jean Follain wrote poems that revisit the provinces of personal and cultural history. His quietly phrased, brief devotions are -described as miniatures, yet are monumental, capturing the pressure of history upon daily moments. By reducing the world to its small objects, every detail, every image becomes imbued with meaning.This bilingual volume, celebrating the centennial of Jean Follain's birth, is translated by W.S. Merwin, who writes in his introduction: Follain's concern is finally with the mystery of the present--the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places, as they seem to be in the best of his poems.