xlii
introduction
poets and poems depended, in many cases, on the individual translators
in consultation with the editor. The enduring wish of all those involved in
this production is that through their contribution readers may, in their
turn, discover something new that may matter even greatly to their future
readings.
Notes- Epigraph: Jacques Garelli, ‘‘Excess of Poetry,’’ in Anthologie de la poésie française du
XXe siècle, ed. Jean-Baptiste Para (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 393. - Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (St. Paul: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), passim. - As the poet Maggie Nelson puts it, American women poets seem to be ‘‘always
constructing some kind of false barrier that we then enjoy crossing and re-crossing’’
(conversation with the author in fall 2002, upon which much of the material comparing
French and American poetry at the present relies). ‘‘We are beginning again,’’ she says,
burying this tiny large statement in the middle of a prose poem, ‘‘Palomas’’ (from ‘‘The
Scratch-Scratch Diaries,’’ in Jennifer Barber, Mark Bibbins, and Maggie Nelson, Take
Three, AGNI New Poets Series, vol. 3 [St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998], p. 133). Aren’t we all? - See Venus Khoury-Ghata, Here There Was Once a Country, translated and with an
introduction by Marilyn Hacker (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 2001), p. xviii. - Aimé Césaire, ‘‘Poésie et connaissance,’’ Tropiques (January 1945), p. 166. The
information is based on the informative article by Ronnie Scharfman in Denis Hollier, ed.,
A New History of French Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 942–
- For information on this period, see Réda Bensmaïa, ‘‘The School of Indepen-
dence,’’ in Hollier, French Literature, 1018–22. - See Guy Sylvestre, ‘‘Canadian Poetry,’’ in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogran (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), pp. 165–66. - When André Gide was queried as to the greatest poet in France, he is said to have
replied, ‘‘Victor Hugo, hélas!’’ - See Warren F. Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Normal, Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). - Pierre de Ronsard, in Les Amours, ed. Marc Bensimon and James L. Martin (Paris:
Garnier/Flammarion, 1981), p. 298. Rough translation: ‘‘When you are very old, crouching
/ By the fire some evening, carding and spinning, you will say, / reciting my poetry and
marveling at it / Ronsard sang of me, when I was lovely. / When you won’t have a single
servant / hearing such a thing, and already / drowsy under her work, who won’t / wake
straight up at the sound of my name, / blessing your name, with immortal praise. // I will
be under the earth and, a ghost without bones, / I’ll be resting under the shade of the
myrtles; / you’ll be crouching at the hearth, old, / regretting my love and your proud
disdain, // Live, if you believe me, don’t wait for tomorrow; / gather today the roses of life.’’ - Claude Berge, ‘‘Quand vous serez bien vieille,’’ pp. 117–18, in Oulipo: A Primer of
Potential Literature, Warren Motte, ed. (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). For a
discussion of combinatory poetry and the Fibonaccian poem, please see Claude Berge,
‘‘For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature,’’ pp. 115–25.