The Poems of Francois Villon

François Villon lived five centuries ago. Of his life little more than a shadowy legend remains—the legend of a student turned vagabond and thief, living amid desperate poverty and violence. Yet the poems Villon created strike the modern reader with singular clarity. He was the first great poet of the city, the first to make art from the harsh physical realities and unsentimental visions of life lived in the urban lower depths. His is a poetry that is direct, forceful, yet infinitely supple, capable of biting satire, uninhibited ribaldry, gallows humor—capable, too, of unsurpassed lyric flight and haunting poignancy. In this new translation — a first version was published over a decade ago — Galway Kinnell has made poems that re-create Villon’s extraordinary sensibility in English. Robert Frost has written that in translation “what is lost is the poetry.” But in the greatest poems, Mr. Kinnell adds, “we find to our amazement that poetry also has an irrepressible translatability. Their wholeness or grace, their vision, sense of life, are so urgent and overriding that the surpassingly great poems seem almost (but not quite) to transcend their words. With them, the ‘poetry,’ even if very little of it, is precisely what does come through in translation. I think Villon’s ‘The Testament’ is one of those greater of poems. This has give me hope that, at moments at least, something essential of his poetry may be translated.” This edition includes the French text-based on the authoritative Longnon-Foulet edition of 1932-facing the English, and a critical introduction, explanatory notes and a selected bibliography.

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