xxvi
introduction
was to certain works and artists and whose criticism and scholarship
would invariably foreground that commitment in ways that would only
imperfectly harmonize with prevailing styles of doing intellectual busi-
ness both outside and within the academy.’’∞ This anthology, when it
reaches the bookstore shelves, may well go against whatever styles of
anthologizing are currently in vogue. My commitment is to a wide reach
of works, with all the risk that entails, and to the judgment of the transla-
tors I have called upon. The deliberately extensive range of poets includes
several who are well known, or even better known, in other genres:
Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Louis-René des Forêts, Andrée Chédid,
Yves Bonnefoy, Annie Le Brun, and Michel Houellebecq, among others.
Here they are considered only as poets—I do not think they would object.
The presentation of poems in this anthology is largely chronological.
As we move closer to the present, the proportion of female to male artists
changes dramatically; additionally, the female voice takes on increasing
assurance as various feminisms develop in France. In French feminisms,
especially in the 1970s, the most visible and general approach was heavily
psychoanalytic—for example, the work of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva,
and Luce Irigaray. In France, as in the United States, feminist agendas
would become increasingly associated with the social sciences, relating
domains formerly isolated from one another in the universities and pub-
lic life. As Terry Eagleton says, the temper of the time was not only
intellectually exciting, but it made room for much that had been excluded
by male enthusiasts of what we call high theory.≤ For Jane Gallop, feminist
writing in France (l’écriture féminine) is perfectly represented by the
formative texts of Hélène Cixous, as in ‘‘Le Rire de la Méduse’’ (The Laugh
of Medusa), characterized by a close relation to the body and sexuality; a
multiplicity of sources, outlooks, and applications; and an appeal to the
common woman (on the model of Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘common reader’’).
The focus on the personal and political, on what is generally termed
identity politics, is far more often crucially felt in the poetic work of
American feminists.≥ In the present anthology, more than a fourth of the
poets and a third of the translators are women, a far greater percentage
than is found in past anthologies of French poetry.
Francophone poetry also came into its own in the twentieth century—
hence the wide-ranging selection of Francophone writers. This interna-
tional dimension encourages the cross-fertilization of various origins,
tongues, and poetic approaches. What the Lebanese Francophone poet
Vénus Khoury-Ghata claims about being doubly nourished by two lan-
guages could be attributed to many Francophone poets. For years, she
says, her first drafts were written in both Arabic, read from right to left,
and French, from left to right.∂ The crossing of such linguistic paths—
metaphoric, psychological, and material—often results in the most ar-