An Earth of Time

Written while Jean Grosjean was a prisoner in the Second World War, Terre du temps, his first book, was published by Gallimard in 1946 and attracted a great deal of attention. It was awarded the Prix de la Pléiade. Between lyric and meditation on Biblical themes, the poems work up to a personal apocalypse.

Jean Grosjean was born in 1912. He became a Roman Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in 1950. He is a noted translator from Near Eastern and other languages: the Koran, books of the New and Old Testaments, the Pléiade editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare.

To date, he has published a dozen books of poetry, of which Fils de l’Homme (1954) received the Prix Max Jacob; Elégies (1967), the Prix des Critiques.  He is included in Gallimard’s popular pocket series “Poésie.” He has also published twelve works of fiction.

For a number of years, from 1967, he was one of the editors of the Nouvelle Revue française.  He died in Versailles, in 2006.

Paradigm Press in Providence has published Elegies in Keith Waldrop’s translation.

Keith  Waldrop's books include The Real Subject (Omnidawn), The House Seen from Nowhere (Litmus Press), Haunt (Instance Press), the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of the Bridge (America Award, 1997), Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec Books), and the novel, Light while there Is Light (Sun & Moon).

He has translated books by Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Esther Tellermann and, most recently, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil.