Elegies [first edition]

Written while Jean Grosjean was a prisoner in the Second World War, Terre du temps, his first book, was published by Gallimard in 1946 and attracted a great deal of attention. It was awarded the Prix de la Pl‚iade. Between lyric and meditation on Biblical themes, the poems work up to a personal apocalypse. Jean Grosjean was born in 1912. He became a Roman Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in 1950. He is a noted translator from Near Eastern and other languages: the Koran, books of the New and Old Testaments, the Pl‚iade editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare. To date, he has published a dozen books of poetry, of which Fils de l'Homme (1954) received the Prix Max Jacob; El‚gies (1967), the Prix des Critiques. He is included in Gallimard's popular pocket series "Po‚sie." He has also published twelve works of fiction. For a number of years, from 1967, he was one of the editors of the Nouvelle Revue fran‡aise. He died in Versailles, in 2006. Paradigm Press in Providence has published Elegies in Keith Waldrop's translation.