French women poets of nine centuries

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2009

French women poets of nine centuries.

Ed. and trans by Norman R. Shapiro.

Johns Hopkins U. Press

2008

1182 pages

$85.00

Hardcover

PQ1167

The 56 poets here share a gift for the use of language and the inability to live unconsidered lives, whether demure, scandalous, pious or profane. Shapiro (romance languages and literatures, Wesleyan U.) understands that such a collection must locate individual poets within a scholarly and literary framework that evolves as much as does the poetry. Working from his elegant translations, with texts in period French and modern English on facing pages, Shapiro not only allows but encourages the voices of the original authors to emerge, from the search for the sacred by Medieval poets to the remarkably independent ladies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cautious skeptics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the women whose questions cut to the core of society in the twentieth century. Complete with biographies and notes, this is sure to become a standard text and reference.

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