The Inventor of the Printing Press

for Pierre-Albert Birot

He held between two irritable fingers
close to the white window glass
the very first
movable character.
It was one of those icy days
when the grasses stiffen
no longer to bend on the islands,
a wild duck was flying at the zenith
and close to the snuffed candles
the fathomless new press,
its composition shaky still,
was going for the first time
to be sweetly seized
by the wild shadows of an evening.
The little people knew nothing yet,
nor did the mothers, nor the Emperor,
nor the miser
and just like now
in broad day before nightfall
everyone was searching
for a part to play.

Translated by Christopher Middleton

The poetry of Jean Follain (1903–1971) is increasingly recognized, by French poets and critics and by his foreign admirers, as central to French poetry’s change of course after the Surrealist period. The poet and novelist Henri Thomas wrote of Follain as one of the poets‘qui parle d’autre chose’, rather than of himself; he admired Follain as a poet remarkably free of rhetoric. Follain’s short, down-
to-earth, subtle poems have influenced a new generation of French poets. To anyone who still believes that modern French poetry is abstruse and over-cerebral, Follain’s delightful and memorable poems are the answer.

Christopher Middleton, the leading poet and translator, has chosen poems spanning Follain’s writing life, from La Main chaude (1933) to Espaces d’instants (1971). He has written an illuminating introduction to his elegant translations.