John Ashbery

John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald

The Bomb

July 1, 2014

Through his translations from the French, John Ashbery joins a body of great twentieth-century American poets who have sought to trace their lineage from elsewhere, as much to undermine prevailing literary conventions as to inform us about those other traditions. In the twin prose and poetry volumes of Ashbery’s Collected French Translations, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a compelling argument can be made—that the wild diversity and vitality of innovative American poetry operates today, in large part, because of what the translator-poet found in Raymond Roussel, Arthur Rimbaud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Jacob. By influencing Ashbery so decisively throughout a seven-decade career, these Frenchmen have shaped us all.