Description

In 1937 the twenty-year-old David Gascoyne, later to be one of the most significant English writers of the twentieth century, found in Paris a copy of Poemes de la folie de Holderlin by the eminent French poet and novelist Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976). The following year he was introduced to Jouve, whose influence would be crucial to the development of his own poetry and philosophy. Gascoyne began translating Jouve s poems at the end of the 1930s when Jouve s wife Blanche, a Freudian psychiatrist, became his analyst.Roger Scott provides a scholarly preface to Section One which includes all Gascoyne s published and uncollected translations of poems by his mentor. In addition, Scott has retrieved a surprising number of unpublished drafts and worksheets of other versions. Section Two of Despair Has Wings reprints Gascoyne s translations of two significant essays by Jouve together with Groethuysen s preface to Poemes de la folie de Holderlin. The Appendix comprises letters in facsimile, unpublished poems by Gascoyne, and three of his articles on Jouve.