Author: Max Jacob

Max Jacob (1876-1944) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, and painter, close companion to Picasso. He helped to create Modernist poetry in France, and his most famous book is the collection of radical prose poems. A Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, Jacob died in the Nazi transit camp of Drancy outside of Paris in March 1944. This poem was translated by Rosanna Warren, who is a poet, translator, and professor of Comparative Literature in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent collection of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). Published with thanks to Mme Sylvia Lorant-Colle and Éditions Gallimard.