Book of the Snow

FRANCOIS JACQMIN (author), acknowledged as one of the foremost francophone Belgian poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, was born in 1929 in Horion-Hozemont in the province of Liege. In 1940 his family fled to England to escape the German occupation. He learned English in a school run by Spanish Jesuits, discovered English literature, and wrote his first unpublished poems in English. He returned to Belgium in 1948 and rediscovered his native language and literature. His association with the irreverent, experimental group that formed around the magazine Phantomas inspired him to develop a distinctive identity as a poet inspired by art, nature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His three major volumes of poetry are Les Saisons (1979), Le Domino gris (1984), and Le Livre de la neige (1990). Elements de geometrie, a volume of prose poems written a few years before his death in 1992, was published in 2005. PHILIP MOSLEY (translator) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He earned his M.A. in European literature and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of East Anglia. Among his book publications are Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity, Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, and Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays. He has translated The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck, Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Tea Masters, Teahouses by Werner Lambersy, and October Long Sunday by Guy Vaes. In 2008 he was awarded the Prix de la Traduction Litteraire by the French Community of Belgium for his translations of Belgian authors into English. CLIVE SCOTT (introduction) is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. His principal research interests lie in French and comparative poetics (The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading, 1998; Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550-2000, 2002 [awarded the R.H. Gapper Book Prize, 2004]); in literary translation, and in particular the translation of poetry (Translating Baudelaire, 2000; Translating Rimbaud's 'Illuminations', 2006); and in photography's relationship with writing (The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, 1999; Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, 2007). He is at present working on a book on the translation of Apollinaire's poetry. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Series Editor's Note, Translator's Preface, Introduction. Snow, The time comes, To return, The landscape is fixed, When we follow, Gentlefolk, What you hear, Hounded by the night, I close my eyes, If we have, In poetry, We raise our eyes, For an inexhaustible instant, The cherries are packed tight, Night, The fog, You suspect, NuNo one gets by with his speech, The snow is everywhere, He who lives, Frozen in its icy crypt, It is midnight, My ruin, I am delighted, It is not the aptness, Night is old, All of a sudden, There has to be a handy slander, Who will make sense of, The role, Literary practice, Beautiful, Heads lowered, We understood that, There is nothing as pointless, What hope is there, The snow was going nowhere, The tendency, We begin a verse, When the snow stopped falling, By dint of, What lesson, The rectilinear distress, He who had a single clear thought, Sometimes, in the night, The fountain, Beneath the snow, Where the snow falls, Being detaches itself from the night, The small scenes, Moved, The boundless is sealed, The mast of nothingness, I no longer stand, Some use the sled,You suffer a little, He who listens, Nothing stifles me too, We await, I cross the enamel, It is not dying, There are men, I open the book, Being, That to which all is given, Night exploits, Nostalgia, Only the dimwitted seraphim, The only thing, We cannot carry on, Let us talk no more, In the clinking, A ferocious blast, We have gone beyond, The contradiction, We see nothing, A first snowfall, There comes an age, There is nothing left, The snow came close, The repose of firs, When I no longer saw anything, Perceptive is he, The forest's low wings, In the white clamour, Everything proven, Since silence, Evening draws in, I can no longer, The impossible, With the snow, We conjugate, What begins, IThere was no landmark, It is eloquent, Being tilts, There is neither forest nor thought, The moon has revealed, After it had snowed, There were several moments, I make myself scarce, The noise, NI am not an author, Cold consumed, Since the frost, JI have had to muster, I do not connect with the world anymore, It is not enough, Day's end, What would be that triumph, In early evening, Biographical Notes.