Zone ─ Selected Poems

Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett’s fifty-year engagement with the great French poet’s life and work.Zone provides an exciting experience of the full range of Apollinaire’s poetry, from his traditional lyric verse to his avant-garde calligrammatic pieces, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from visionary poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. This volume includes an introduction by Peter Read, the finest Apollinaire scholar in the English-speaking world, as well as a preface, helpful endnotes, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett. There have been previous versions of Apollinaire, but this one is special, for it is not only a compact and judicious selection of the essential Apollinaire, it is also a feat of translation by an American poet about whomThe Washington Post said, “No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett’s translations.”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. He was also a fiction writer, experimental playwright, pioneering art critic, and editor of erotica. He invented the word “surrealism.”

Translator and poet Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the 2013Los Angeles Times Prize for the best poetry book. Padgett has translated the poetry of Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Valery Larbaud, and Blaise Cendrars.

Peter Read is Professor of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in the United Kingdom. He has published books and essays on Apollinaire and his circle, and on artists working in France, including Picasso, Giacometti, and Raoul Dufy.