Creole Echoes The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana [Paperback]

Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of highly accomplished verses. This work contains poems by more than thirty different poets, presented in their original French alongside English translations. Edited by renowned translator Norman R. Shapiro.American literature is not only more than Hawthorne and Poe; it is more than English. Long before the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets and their white colleagues were writing in Louisiana, in French, with a quality inspired and polished by a sense of poetic community. These were the Creole poets of the 1800s, creators of a body of work that is at last available in an English translation by renowned translator Norman R. Shapiro. Creole poets have always eluded easy categorization, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of often highly accomplished and always strikingly engaging verse. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets. The poems gathered here exhibit the Creole poets' wide range of theme, tone, and sensibility. Somber elegies, whimsical verse, animal fables, love sonnets, odes to nature, curses, polemics, and lauds all find voices hereNorman R. Shapiro is Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation at Wesleyan University. His many published volumes span the centuries, medieval to modern, and the genres: poetry, theater, and novels. He has won many of the major translation awards and is an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des lettres de la Republique Francaise and a member of the Academy of American PoetsM. Lynn Weiss is an associate professor of American studies at the College of William and Mary and the author of Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism