The fiftieth-anniversary edition of New York School poet Lewis Warsh’s long out-of-print translation of a major poem by Robert Desnos, pillar of French Surrealism, presented alongside the original text.

Desnos’s Night of Loveless Nights—written in tribute to legendary French chanteuse Yvonne George in 1926—is a maelstrom of romantic despair, political upswell, and psychedelic irony. John Ashbery’s claim that Frank O’Hara 1971 collected poems was “the founding of a new tradition” should be made for both Desnos’s poem and Warsh’s translation. Long unavailable, Warsh’s Desnos stands beside Ron Padgett’s Cendrars and John Ashbery’s Rimbaud, a sublime translation experiment of letting the language speak for itself—as had the poem’s author. Originally published in 1973 by poet and translator David Rosenberg in The Ant’s Forefoot chapbook series, Warsh’s translation is reproduced in this fiftieth anniversary edition alongside the French original, and with an afterword by Rosenberg.

Author: Robert Desnos
Year: 2023
Pages: 80
Dimensions: 5.12 x 7.95 in.
Cover: Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-959708-03-2
Language: English