Book record
Paroles
Jacques Prévert
Translated from French by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is a meeting of two public, accessible, and unmistakably performative poetic temperaments. Prévert’s French poems are known for their directness, wit, political feeling, tenderness, and street-level theatricality. Ferlinghetti’s translation gives the book an English-language life connected to spoken poetry, counterculture, and a democratic sense of address. I would read Paroles not as simple poetry, but as poetry that knows the value of being immediately heard. It belongs to cafés, classrooms, sidewalks, love affairs, protests, and memory. The poems’ accessibility is not a weakness. It is part of their social intelligence. They understand that a line can be clear and still carry irony, sorrow, and revolt.
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Language
- French
- Country
- France