The Canticle of Wing (Translated): Last Poems, Selected

This new translation of Rostand's last poems includes: - The first English version of these poems, made for this edition- A selection made for this edition, with the reasons given in full- A translator's note on the verse and on what was left outThe last book. Rostand died of the Spanish influenza in December 1918, at fifty, and these poems were gathered and published four years later. The subject running through them is flight. He was living in the Basque country when the first aeroplanes began crossing France, and one of them went over his garden low enough to graze the roof; the sonnet he wrote about it ends with him crying out for joy at seeing his own sky turn into a road. The long title poem is the hymn that followed. It was written while men were still being killed almost weekly trying to get off the ground, and it says so - a third of it is a roll call of the dead, and the last line hands the whole invention back to Prometheus, who studied the vulture's wings while it was eating his liver. Two of the longest poems here are what happens when that subject meets the ancient world. In The Sacred Wood, the twelve gods have gathered in the last olive grove in Greece and are about to dance when a motor car breaks down on the road outside - and Vulcan, god of the forge, who recognises a made thing when he sees one, falls in love with the engine. In The Twelve Labours, Omphale hands Hercules a distaff twelve times over, and twelve times he turns it into a weapon and re-enacts a labour rather than spin, until a dancing dwarf whose entire art is the phrase "what is the good?" does what no monster could. There is also a day in the life of a précieuse of the sixteen-forties, and a pilgrimage on foot to the Basque village whose name Victor Hugo borrowed for his play, made on the centenary of Hugo's birth. This is a selection. The occasional pieces - an ode to an empress, a prize-day address, verses for a gala - have been left out, and the translator's note says exactly which and why, including the one poem judged untranslatable rather than merely difficult. Night Workers publishes lost French writing in fresh, modern English.