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Here is the Introduction to the next translation project, which is now well underway. Publication planned for sometime in the summer.

"Verlaine’s ‘Les Poètes Maudits’, or the ‘Accursed’ Poets, was first published in 1884, and later expanded to form this text published in August 1888. Within the work, Verlaine (1844-1896) paid tribute to Tristan Corbière (1845-1875), Rimbaud (1854-1891), Mallarmé (1842-1898), Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) and Villiers de l’Isle Adam (1838-1889), while calling himself, using an anagram of his name, ‘Pauvre Lélian’. The phrase ‘poète maudit’ had been coined by Alfred de Vigny in his 1832 novel ‘Stello,’ in which he called the tribe of poets ‘la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre’, ‘the race that will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth’. 

            I will also be translating a selections of thirty or so poems by Tristan Corbière.