Desires; Sixty-five French Poems Plus a Small But Famous German One. John Fraser

John Fraser, Desires: Sixty-five French poems and one small but famous German one, translated and introduced by John Fraser. <br><br>The core of Desires is a mini-anthology of sixty-five French poems translated by John Fraser and described in the foreword by scholar-translator Benoit Tadi&Atilde;&copy; as &quot;beautiful&quot; and &quot;intensely empathetic.&quot; Taken from Fraser&#39;s major online anthology A New Book of Verse, they belong in an emergent re-seeing of French poetic history. <br><br>Part I consists largely of &quot;libertine&quot; (free-thinking) poems from the Renaissance and 17th century, in which the joys of Eros are celebrated within a realworld context of the body&#39;s limitations (age, impotence, the pox) and savage punishments for &quot;heresy&quot; (lethal imprisonment, burning at the stake). The language, at times unfussily direct, at others richly figurative, is refreshingly free of Petrarchan and neo-classical clich&Atilde;&copy;s. <br><br>Among the male poets are Ronsard, Th&Atilde;&copy;ophile de Viau, and Claude Le Petit. Among the women, witty aristocrats with minds and desires of their own, like Heliette de Vivonne and Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine. The classicism (real, not neo-) of Part I is followed in Part II by the classical romanticism of a variety of 19th and 20th century poems. There had been underground continuities during the neo-classical dominance.. <br><br>The book includes major discoveries like Le Petit&#39;s 300-line &quot;Farewell of the Pleasure Girls to the City of Paris&quot; and Jeanne-Marie Durry&#39;s &quot;Orpheus&#39; Plea&quot;; subversive poems by radicals like Louise Michel, Aristide Bruand, and Georges Brassens; and fresh translations of poems by classics like Desbordes-Valmore. Gautier, Laforgue, and Apollinaire, including the last-named&#39;s notoriously difficult &quot;Lul de Faltenin.&quot; There is a long iconoclastic introduction, numerous notes, and an affectionate appendix on Gerard de Nerval and classical-romanticism, with very funny quotations from his fiction.<br><br>The eleven hundred Anglo, French, and German poems in A New Book of Verse can be accessed via Voices in the Cave of Being.