ABSTRACT
Born at No. 29, Twentieth Century, as he quips in Le Vingtième me fatigue (2004), the French poet Jacques Réda has fully blossomed in the twenty-first. He has produced, during the past three years especially, a variety of invigorating books: no less than two novels, a major collection of verse, a shorter second collection ( Moyens de transport, 2003) unified by a favorite theme (motion and locomotion), as well as five gatherings of autobiographical prose interspersed with some adventuresome forays into short fiction. (And in these collections of short prose a few poems are usually thrown in as extras.) In addition, Jennie Feldman, an excellent late-blooming British poet who remains to be discovered (see her The Lost Notebook), has now vividly and resourcefully translated Réda’s early verse in Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975 . It is a splendid selection of the poems that “anticipated,” as Feldman points out in her introduction, “the ‘new lyricism’ [in French poetry] that was to gather momentum in the 1980s.” Until now, all that we have had in English are Mark Treharne’s equally fine rendering of Réda’s best-known volume of prose poems, The Ruins of Paris (the French original dates back to 1977), and Dorothy Brown Aspinwall’s long out-of-print translation of his second (1970) collection of poetry, Récitatif / The Party is Over. During the past several years, the American poet Andrew Shields has translated, for literary reviews, samplings of Réda’s more recent verse; but despite the efforts of these four translators, most of the poems, stories, mini-essays, delightful prose memoirs, and lively critical writings produced by this essential European author still remain inaccessible in English. (As this book goes to press, Aaron Prevots’s version of Retour au calme [1989] has welcomely been brought out by Host Publications.)
