The Poetry Of Yvan Goll

Yvan Goll is one of the great lyric poets and authors of the twentieth century.

Yvan Goll (1891-1950), a poet of many talents and many languages, his journal Surrealism (1924) was the first to feature surrealist work much to the chagrin of Andre Breton. A Jewish intellectual living in NYC during World War II, much of his French language poetry, including "Landless John," was translated into English by various hands including William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell. He was the first to translate Aime Cesaire's "Notebook" into English. Near his death, he wrote a large number of love poems addressed to his wife Claire. Some were published as "Dream Weed / Traumkraut," Goll's work best known to English readers, others are to be found in "Neila," a work of restless paranoia and gripping intensity, translated here into English for the first time."

"In these magnificent and stirring last poems, the great Yvan Goll is recording nothing less than the disintegration of the European soul, using the intellectual resources of a highly influential and cosmopolitan imagination. One of the finest and most revered poets of the twentieth century, Goll receives the tender treatment he deserves in these remarkably vivid and masterful translations."--Keith Flynn, author of 'The Golden Ratio' and 'The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory' This is the first English translation of the last poems of Yvan Goll , one of the twentieth century's finest European poets.

Thirty years of poems chronicle the sometimes turbulent marriage of two famed writers