Selections from Paroles

by Jacques Prévert, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Translator)

Jacques Prévert is a contemporary master of the plain but telling word. Paroles is his central work. This selection with translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti shows both Prévert's violently anarchic moods and the lyricism that makes him a poet of the people.

Penguin Modern European Poets D84

Genres: Poetry, France

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Jacques Prévert est un poète et scénariste français, né le 4 février 1900 à Neuilly-sur-Seine, et mort le 11 avril 1977 à Omonville-la-Petite (Manche). Auteur d'un premier succès, le recueil de poèmes, Paroles, il devint un poète populaire grâce à son langage familier et à ses jeux sur les mots. Ses poèmes sont depuis lors célèbres dans le monde francophone et massivement appris dans les écoles françaises. Il a également écrit des scénarios pour le cinéma où il est un des artisans du réalisme poétique.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

You whom I didn’t know
You who didn’t know me
Remember
Remember that day still
Don’t forget
A man was taking cover on a porch
And he cried your name
Barbara
And you ran to him in the rain
Streaming-wet enraptured flushed
And you threw yourself in his arms
[…]
Remember Barbara
Don’t forget
That good and happy rain
On your happy face
On that happy town
That rain upon the sea
[…]
It’s rained all day on Brest today
As it was raining before
But it isn’t the same anymore
And everything is wrecked
It’s a rain of mourning terrible and desolate

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paroles was first published in French 1949.
Selections from Paroles English translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti first appeared in book form in the USA by City Lights Books in San Francisco 1958. The poems comprise nearly half of the complete Paroles.
This 1965 Penguin Modern European Poets edition has a good Introduction by Ferlinghetti, 1964.

Read Selections from Paroles and then listen to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revistited, and Blonde On Blonde.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last line in this book of poems perfectly describes this collection...

"Handsome as hell."

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truncated selection - whittled down by Ferlinghetti, its translator - of Prévert's 1946 selection of poems Paroles. The works inside are all simple and whip past the reader brightly, communicating the feeling of a moment in time with an undertone of discord, of something more that's hidden behind the scenes. Sex, murder, worries and the grind of war and history are all pondered - or left to the reader to ponder - in these Parisian scenes, explaining why the selection of poetry is so well-regarded in France.

I'm always a bit conflicted reading something in translation. I'm always thinking I'm missing something - that the choice of words is perhaps not elegant, or speaking to the author's intention. This goes double for poetry - I admit it must be more difficult for translators of poetry as one must have to render both meaning and the innate sense of beauty or form inherent in the original, but the reader is always left guessing. Is this what is intended?

[Zuberino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prévert is pure magic - I thought so from the very first moment I laid eyes on his work, a kid barely out of my teens, going to the Alliance Francaise in Dhaka for my very first lessons in the French language. So many years ago, so many memories of those rainy evenings in Dhanmondi, suffused by the warmth and laughter and companionship of that cafe; many before us and many after remember it still with love and nostalgia, a tiny roomful of joyous light surrounded by the monstrous city and its ramshackle drabness.

That classic of Prévertian restraint, "Dejeuner du matin", was in our first-year text; I can still recite verses from it at random. That and many many other gems are present in this collection, culled by none other than St Lawrence of San Francisco, from Prévert's super-duper-bestselling-all-time classic Paroles. I had no idea that Ferlinghetti had done a PhD on Prévert at the Sorbonne (!) - but he clearly "gets" the essence of Prévert. To me, the strength of a book of poems is in its hit rate, how many poems arrested me upon reading, and I don't know if Ferlinghetti only chose the best of the best from Paroles (which I actually do have in the original French as well), but these Selections have an exceptionally high proportion of strong pieces: my system of ticks and dots tells me that some 2/3 of this collection struck a chord with me.

Prévert is all about eviscerating the bourgeois and their bottomless hypocrisies, most shamefully exposed during the Vichy regime, an episode that returns insistently as a theme of several of these poems. There's the surreal stuff, nowhere more explicit than in the last looooong piece "Picasso's Magic Lantern". There are his paeans to youth, to non-conformity, and there are moments of pure beauty and quiet despair snatched from the grit and grime of Paris éternel, the midcentury Paris that is forever fixed in the world's collective memory.

In the end, even the briefest discussion has to come back to his language. With Prévert, his plainness is inseparable from the beauty and the potency of his poems. The beauty IS the simplicity. Compared to him, even the flintiest minimalists of the literary world can sound like garrulous gasbags. When he starts to hit those insistent rhyming beats, the hypnotic effect created by the short sharp lines are like nothing you have ever read. There are many many examples littered throughout this wonderful book, but I choose the surreal dreamscape of "Place du Carrousel". Beat this if you can.

*

Place du Carrousel
vers la fin d'un beau jour d'été
le sang d'un cheval
accidenté et dételé
ruisselait
sur le pavé
Et le cheval était là
debout
immobile
sur trois pieds
Et l'autre pied blessé
blessé et arraché
pendait
Tout à côté
debout
immobile
il y avait aussi le cocher
et puis la voiture elle aussi immobile
inutile comme une horloge cassée
Et le cheval se taisait
le cheval ne se plaignait pas
le cheval ne hennissait pas
il était là
il attendait
et il était si beau si triste si simple
et si raisonnable
qu'il n'était pas possible de retenir ses larmes

Oh
jardins perdus
fontaines oubliées
prairies ensoleillées
oh douleur
splendeur et mystère de l'adversité
sang et lueurs
beauté frappée
Fraternité.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

This needed more poems. Perhaps then I would have given it a higher rating, it feels like it deserves it.


Favorite poems:

Flowers and Wreaths
Lazy Morning
Song in the Blood
The Red Horse
One Shouldn't
The Discourse on Peace

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I want to commend Lawrence Ferlinghetti for selecting and translating these selections of Jacques Prevert’s Paroles. He chose and translated wonderfully, and it only made me want to dive into the collection in its entirety. I had heard great things about Jacques Prevert, and this only heightened my curiosity about his work and solidified his legacy.

In Selections from Paroles, Jacques Prevert pulls the slender poetic acts out of the bones, flesh, and assholes of the street dwellers and litters his pages with their corporeal confetti. Prevert’s Paroles poetically smears the quotidian acts of his subjects’ lives across the page, leaving behind the residue of their capricious and disorderly biological urbanity. This section of the Paroles illuminates the insanity of the mundane. Prevert shows us that normality is quite mad, odd, and utterly unnerving. What arises from these poetic scenes is scribed in the bodily fluid of daily life, which is bright and fertile when new but reeks of a tart bitterness when time has crusted it over.

Prevert shows the street as a womb for the birth of art. Every corner, every face, is then a garden for the bloom of a verse. Prevert’s verses vibrantly verb. They are elastic in their motions, becoming, writhing through the township of his poems, stretching their limbs in his streets, and dancing upon the tables. They take over and shower the reader in the intoxicating drink that pours over our heads.

As we enter this new era of American fascism, the poem “New Order” took me on an especially interesting odyssey into what it was like to create art during the Nazi occupation. This poem combined horror with absurd beauty. The juxtaposition of fascist symbols, imagery, and people arranged directly beside motifs of vulnerability and beauty lent the poem to the absurd or eerie. But this poem also pushed these evil acts into the light and exposed them to international witnesses while expressing to the regime that they could not defeat the soul of an artist.

His last poem, “Picasso’s Magic Lantern,” was a gorgeous way to end this collection. Personally, I found it provided insight into how to create highly creative and critical art while under fascist occupation. Besides these timely poems about fascism, my other favorite poems were “Lazy Morning,” “Familial,” “Song in the Blood,” “The Discourse on Peace,” and “Vincent’s Lament.” They all embody Prevert’s clever penchant for subversion, critique, and originality.

[Michael A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

the picasso poems were good (especially magic lantern), a couple of other decent ones, the rest were mediocre or forgettable

[w3rmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

randomly picked this up and loved it! read it in one sitting :)

[Tony Schnyder · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some humorous poems in this collection by Jacques Prevert, as well as some more moving ones. I especially like the one about the person returning to their hometown in Brittany.