Night of Loveless Nights - Robert Desnos

Night of Loveless Nights by Robert Desnos, translated by Lewis Warsh / Afterword by David Rosenberg / ISBN 9781959708032 / 70-page paperback published in 2023 by Winter Editions *** The fiftieth-anniversary edition of New York School poet Lewis Warsh’s long out-of-print translation of a major poem by Robert Desnos, pillar of French Surrealism, presented alongside the original text. Desnos’s Night of Loveless Nights—written in tribute to legendary French chanteuse Yvonne George in 1926—is a maelstrom of romantic despair, political upswell, and psychedelic irony. John Ashbery’s claim that Frank O’Hara 1971 collected poems was “the founding of a new tradition” should be made for both Desnos’s poem and Warsh’s translation. Long unavailable, Warsh’s Desnos stands beside Ron Padgett’s Cendrars and John Ashbery’s Rimbaud, a sublime translation experiment of letting the language speak for itself—as had the poem’s author. Originally published in 1973 by poet and translator David Rosenberg in Th