Synopses & Reviews
In 1937 the twenty-year-old David Gascoyne, later to be one of the most significant English writers of the twentieth century, found in Paris a copy of Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin by the eminent French poet and novelist Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976). The following year he was introduced to Jouve, whose influence would be crucial to the development of his own poetry and philosophy. Gascoyne began translating Jouve's poems at the end of the 1930s when Jouves wife Blanche, a Freudian psychiatrist, became his analyst. Roger Scott provides a scholarly preface to Section One which includes all Gascoyne's published and uncollected translations of poems by his mentor. In addition, Scott has retrieved a surprising number of unpublished drafts and worksheets of other versions. Section Two of Despair Has Wings reprints Gascoyne's translations of two significant essays by Jouve together with Groethuysen's preface to Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin. The Appendix comprises letters in facsimile, unpublished poems by Gascoyne, and three of his articles on Jouve.
Synopsis
This collection includes all David Gascoyne's published and uncollected translations of poems by his mentor French writer Pierre Jean Jouve. Also included are reprints of Gascoyne's translations of two significant essays by Jouve. The Appendix comprises letters in facsimile, unpublished poems by Gascoyne. and three of his articles on Jouve.
About the Author
Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) is regarded in France as one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. His work as a poet, novelist, critic and translator, influenced that of Pierre Emmanuel and Yves Bonnefoy in France, and David Gascoyne in England. In spiritual crisis in the 1920s Jouve disowned all his previous writing. Renewing his Catholic faith and pursuing his preoccupation with Freud (he married Blanche Reverchon, a psychoanalyst, in 1925) and the mystics, he entered his vita nuova. Noces (1928) and his translations (with Pierre Klossowski), Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin (1930), preceded his most significant poetry collections: Sueur de sang (1935); Matière Céleste (1937); Kyrie (1938). During that period, he established his reputation as a novelist with Paulina 1880 (1925), Le Monde désert (1927) and Vagadu (1930).