Book record
Ship of Gold
Émile Nelligan
Translated from French by Marc Di Saverio
Émile Nelligan’s Ship of Gold, translated by Marc Di Saverio, gathers the work of a foundational French Canadian poet whose reputation has often been tied to youthful brilliance, symbolist intensity, and romantic collapse. The title poem is famous for good reason, but the collection’s value is not simply historical. Nelligan’s poetry gives English-language readers access to a Québécois lyric tradition full of music, melancholy, religious atmosphere, and heightened self-dramatization. Di Saverio’s translation must navigate rhyme, rhetoric, and the lushness of a late nineteenth-century sensibility without turning the poems into costume. I would read this book as a vessel of excess and fragility: gold, yes, but also wreckage, weather, youth, and the theatrical grandeur of a mind pressing hard against its limits.
- Publisher
- Signal Editions
- Language
- French
- Country
- Canada