French Translation

The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation awarded their 20th annual Translation Prizes in New York Tuesday evening, giving the fiction prize to Cambridge University professor Sandra Smith and the nonfiction prize to Bruce Fink, a psychology professor at Duquesne University.

You will note there aren't any prizes for poetry translation. Which is sad in itself. The cultural state of poetry in France is barely better than in the US. Much like American schools, the French literature curriculum includes what could be considered canonical writers. Mostly dead people, Aimé Césaire being an exception. My orals list for the baccalauréat included poems by Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo and Robert Brasillach (the fiction list included André Malraux's L'espoir, Musset's Lorenzaccio and a third book I can't remember). I did hear, at the time, about OuLiPo and what they did (mostly the n+7 technique and Georges Pérec's La disparition), but there wasn't much of contemporary poetry being discussed.

But while American trade publishers (HarperCollins, Knopf, etc.) will only publish the boring stuff (Mary Oliver, Edward Hirsch, Mark Doty, ... John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler and Adrienne Rich being really exceptions), the major French publishers still show an engagement toward experimental poetics. Anne-Marie Albiach, Henri Deluy and Emmanuel Hocquard are published by Flammarion, Jacques Roubaud by Gallimard and Liliane Giraudon by P.o.l. and Stock.

Not to mention the (relative) success of experimental American poets on that side of the Atlantic (Zukofsky, Palmer, Ashbery, ...).