Selected Poems: Bilingual Edition

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Camille Claudel—all French artists
of genius who were misunderstood and scorned by their contemporaries,
and who either were locked away or had to live lives of isolation. May
we learn from their misfortunes, may we learn not to condemn their
originality.

Йmile Nelligan (1879–1941), a brilliant young French-Canadian poet
in the Romantic tradition, had a short literary career of two years
before falling into mental illness and being confined to psychiatric
facilities, where he languished for the next 41 years until his death.
Nelligan’s work was deeply influenced by the poetry of the Symbolist
movement. We might compare his poem “Je sens voler” with
Baudelaire’s “Albatros,” the musicality of his “Berceuse” with
that of the poems of Paul Verlaine (who, like Rimbaud and Baudelaire,
was a Symbolist poet).

Selected Poems is a sensitive English translation of Nelligan’s work
by the late P.F. Widdows. Originally published in 1960 by Ryerson Press,
this new edition will be saluted with enthusiasm by all those who
believe, like Nelligan, that a poet’s thought can be “the colour of
gold moons far away.”