One of the most original and influential European poets of the Middle Ages, François Villon took his inspiration from the streets, taverns, and jails of Paris. Villon was a subversive voice speaking from the margins of society. He wrote about love and sex, money trouble, "the thieving rich," and the consolations of good food and wine. His work is striking in its directness, wit, and gritty urban realism. Villon’s writing spurred the development of the psychologically complex first-person voice in lyric poetry. He has influenced generations of avant-garde poets and artists. Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine have emulated Villon’s poetry. Claude Debussy set it to music, and Bertolt Brecht adapted it for the stage. Ezra Pound championed Villon’s poetry and became largely responsible for its impact on modern verse. With David Georgi’s ingenious translation, English-speaking audiences finally have a text that captures the riotous energy and wordplay of the original. With a newly revised French text that reflects the latest scholarship, this bilingual edition also features inviting and informative notes that illuminate the nuances of Villon’s poems and the world of medieval Paris.

This new (bilingual) edition of the 15th-century poet1s work incorporates recent scholarship.

Louis Simpson's translation of Francois Villon's The Legacy and The Testament has achieved the impossible, as Simpson has created the definitive translation of the life work of France's greatest poet of the 15th century Abandoned by his parents at an early age and raised by a foster father, later imprisoned, chained and tortured, somehow Villon survived to write one of the most enduring epics ever.

Taylor explores the work of François Villon and his relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries.

Works by Villon, Ronsard, Voltaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, many more. Full French texts with literal English translations on facing pages. Biographical, critical information on each poet. Introduction. 31 black-and-white illustrations.

In this study of Pound's radio operas of the 1930s, Margaret Fisher draws on the unpublished correspondence between Pound and his maverick BBC producer, Edward Archibald Fraser Harding, to reveal a little-known aspect of Pound's career.

Winner • Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation Bawdier than The Canterbury Tales, The Fabliaux is the first major English translation of the most scandalous and irreverent poetry in Western literature. Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking even by today’s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old French text, The Fabliaux comes to life in a way that has never been done in nearly eight hundred years.

In recent years, literary scholars have come increasingly to acknowledge that an adequate understanding of texts requires the study of books, the material objects through which the meanings of texts are constructed. Focusing on French poetry in the period 1400-1600, contributors to this volume analyze layout, illustration, graphology, paratext, typography, anthologization, and other such elements in works by a variety of writers, among them Charles d'Orléans, Jean Bouchet, Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé. They demonstrate how those elements play a crucial role in shaping the relationships between authors, texts, contexts, and readers, and how these relationships change as the nature of the book evolves. An introduction to the volume outlines the methodological implications of studying the materiality of literature in this period; situates the various papers in relation to each other and to the field as a whole; and indicates possible future directions of research in the field. By engaging with issues of major current methodological concern, this volume appeals to all scholars interested in the materiality of the literary text, including the burgeoning field of text-image studies, not only in French but also in other national literatures. In addition, it enables fruitful connections to be made between late-medieval and Renaissance literature, areas still often studied in isolation from each other.