These poems are a bitter lover’s quarrel with the world. In one, “Pater Noster,” the poet prays to “Our father in heaven” and tells him to stay there, leaving the earth to humans. In addition to listing the mysteries of New York and Paris (“at least as good as that of the Trinity”) and idyllic places in the countryside around Paris, he also mentions “the world’s outrageous misfortunes.”
As another poem says, it is “a world without knowledge of how to live but full of the joy of living.”
The quarrel continues in the following poem in the collection, “Rue de Seine,” between a woman who wants to know it all (all what? Her partners’ misdeeds or the atrocities of the occupation) and Pierre, who “has a smile that perhaps he wishes were tender.”
More than one poem rails at the folly of fathers and mothers sending their sons to war, while the pre-war memory of one glimpse of a pretty girl named Barbara haunts him as he returns to where he saw her, the now-ruined Brest.
The final two poems are homages to Picasso; the second evokes the painter’s Guernica.
This book selects roughly half the poems in the original French collection with the same title. I haven’t compared these translations to the French originals. My impression, though, is that Lawrence Ferlinghetti has managed both to be faithful to Prévert and speak in a voice recognizably his. The result are poems that make Prévert seem a kindred spirit to the Beats.
At times, I was reminded of songs of Dylan, particularly in “I’ve Seen Some of Them,” with its concluding lines presaging the sights Dylan records in his song, “Hard Rain.” But that’s a subject for further study. Ferlinghetti published this collection in 1964, Dylan wrote “Hard Rain” in 1962. Had he heard Ferlinghetti read this? Had this circulated before publication? Or was this an idea that was simply blowing in the wind? ( )