ABSTRACT
Pierre-Albert Jourdan (1924–1981) is one of the best-kept secrets of French literature. Admired at the end of his too-short life by leading lights among his contemporaries, including René Char, Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Réda, Lorand Gaspar, Paul de Roux, and Anne Perrier, Jourdan is now highly regarded by a select group of younger French poets, yet he has nonetheless not received the broader critical attention that he deserves in France, and next to no attention in foreign countries—a pleasing exception to which is Argentina, where a pioneering translation of one of his first books, La Langue des fumées (The Language of Rising Smoke, 1961), has appeared in Julia Azaretto’s version as La lengua de las humaredas . Jourdan’s “radiance” has long been “unjustly reduced,” as Jaccottet aptly summed up the situation when I first wrote to him about my project to translate Jourdan’s work.
