For example, they had worked through and even been asked to imitate the well-known “How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird,” which begins predictably enough (“First paint a cage / with an open door.”) but then ends with a touching twist:Īnd you sign your name in a corner of the canvas. And a quick survey, taken among my French poet-friends in their forties and fifties, confirmed that they too had studied quite a lot of Prévert at about the same tender age. My French-American son (born in 1992) was given Prévert to read during his last two years of grade school, though not afterwards, when his middle-school French classes focused on Molière. Shapiro’s skillful and oft befittingly witty translation of verse by Jacques Prévert (1900–1977) reports that the volume Paroles sold some 500,000 copies when it appeared in 1945 and that Prévert’s “poems are taught widely in France and included in all major anthologies of 20th-century French poetry.” Actually, it seems that the various subsequent editions of Paroles have sold a total 2.5 million copies, a sum implying that the author of the lines “Our father who art in heaven / Stay put / And we’ll stay here on earth” stands not far behind Albert Camus (1913–1960), the author of The Stranger (1942), in the list of modern authors who wrote durable bestsellers. Préversities: A Jacques Prévert Sampler by Jacques Prévert. He relishes finding equivalents for Jacques Prévert’s rhyming, which induces him to take some justifiable liberties in regard to the original. Norman Shapiro’s enthusiasm as a translator is felt not only in the versions themselves but also in his introduction and notes.

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