Plein Amour is the finest collection of poems by the twentieth-century French poet, Lucien Becker. For a parallel-text edition, the distinguished translator of Tristan Corbière and Max Jacob, Christopher Pilling, has made a complete translation of this superb volume of love poems.
Love. Desire. Eroticism. 'In these poems woman and the outside world merge into one,' the distinguished French poet Lucien Becker (1911-84) said of poems that were to form the nucleus of his 1954 collection Plein amour. 'What's more', he went on, 'I'd go as far as to say that I can only understand the world through a woman's body there in front of my eyes like a prism.' And he admitted in a letter to a friend 'Love is my obsession.'
In Love at the Full, this translation of Plein amour, love and woman are central, as are the villages and countryside of Lorraine. It is probably Becker's finest achievement, a sequence of sixty-six poems, divided into four sections, and brought over into English for the first time by the poet Christopher Pilling, who also provides an introduction to this parallel-text edition.
Love at the Full was named by the Poetry Book Society as its recommended translation for the Autumn Quarter, 2004, and has been shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. This £1,500 prize is sponsored by the Ratiu Family Foundation and is awarded every other year. It is open to collections of poetry translated from a European language into English. The prize honours Corneliu Popescu, a talented young Romanian translator who was killed in the 1977 Romanian earthquake.
Love at the Full (Plein Amour) costs £7.95 and was published in 2004.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-61-2
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