Jose-Maria de Heredia's Les Trophees

Poetry. Translated from the French by John Anson. "John Anson's version of José-Maria Heredia's sonnet sequence Les Trophées is a triumph of the translator's art and makes Heredia's neglected masterpiece accessible to an English-speaking audience perhaps for the first time. 'The Trophées gave me one of my greatest joys as a poet,' wrote Mallarmé to Heredia in 1893, the year the volume was published; and indeed, as Anson explains in his excellent introduction, Heredia's 'sonnets constitute the finest flower of the Parnassian movement.' The task that Anson set himself—that of maintaining Heredia's Petrarchan rhyme scheme for all 118 poems in the sequence—was an extraordinarily arduous one, given the comparative paucity of rhymes in english. And yet, Anson has succeeded remarkably well. His version of the Trophées, while remaining faithful to the original and alert to most of the nuances in the French, is beautifully calibrated both to the ambiance of the period in which the poems were composed and to the English of Anson's own audience. In short, this is a tour de force."—Henry Weinfield