Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana's Radical Civil War-Era Newspapers
Collected here for the first time, seventy-nine poems published in the Civil War–era Afro-Creole New Orleans newspapers L’Union and La Tribune—most unavailable anywhere but in archives—bring to life a close-knit, politically progressive French-speaking community of artists and intellectuals whose cultural and legal legacies were monumental. The original French poems appear here alongside Clint Bruce’s sensitive English translations, mindful of meaning, meter, and sound.
A comprehensive introduction, biographies of the poets, and extensive annotations immerse readers in Civil War–era Louisiana. In his research for the volume, Bruce unearthed crucial issues of La Tribune long thought lost and discovered the extent of a poetic hoax undetected for nearly 150 years.
Distributed for the Historic New Orleans Collection
- CHOICEThis handsome, thematically arranged collection of 79 poems... adds significantly to the corpus of French-language poetry published in 19th-century Louisiana.... [Bruce's] extensive historical and contextual introduction and the biographies of the poets are invaluable resources. The detailed notes on translation add further useful information. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
- WINNER: MLA Lois Roth Award for Translation of a Literary Work"[A]n extraordinary publication, combining archival research with remarkably accomplished translations.... [B]rings to light a little-known tradition of political poetry by Afro-Creole poets of Louisiana... a handsomely produced book, with annotations, illustrations, and a beautifully written historical and literary introduction." —MLA Lois Roth Award Selection Committee
- American Literary History[A] stellar edition and translation.... significantly enhances our knowledge of Black writing and print culture in the nineteenth-century US.
- American Literary Translators Association, Longlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award in Poe[A] book of tremendous historical value. Its substantial introduction draws the reader into the story of the newspapers.... The translations strive to show the formal mastery of the originals, underlining the sophistication of the writers.... Every reader will learn important things from this book: it restores a wrongly forgotten but now-inspiring chapter in Francophone poetic creativity and US history.
Clint Bruce holds the Canada Research Chair in Acadian and Transnational Studies at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia.
