Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (review)

This book, by the editor and translator of a collection of Poe's works (Le Chat noir et autres contes) in the popular Livre de poche bilingue series, has the considerable merit of bringing together in one volume "French Poe"—Poe as translated by Baudelaire and Mallarme, and subsequently scrutinized in their translations by many a French critic and theorist as though the texts had been written in French—and "American Poe", the Poe of popular literary culture in the Anglophone world. The book offers a substantial example of the two Poes coming together, a process that has been happening gradually for decades. I know of no better general introduction to Poe's prose works. While Justin does use the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, he also makes use of sources in the original English, such as Gary R. Thompson's edition of the Essays and Reviews in the Library of America series. The book is balanced and accessible without sacrificing subtlety or issues of critical theory: "En faisant prendre à la littérature une conscience aigue de sa textualité, Poe lui donne un nouvel horizon de sens." (p. 386) Yet it also freely acknowledges the critical role of Poe in the evolution of American popular literature:

A l'inverse, on assiste a un total effondrement du texte proprement dit dans un phénomène dont je ne connais d'autres exemples dans l'histoire de la littérature: a savoir, l'extraordinaire présence de Poe dans toutes les formes de la culture populaire américaine. Voici Poe comme personnage de ses propres histories et d'autres histoires.

(p. 387).

It is certainly true that Poe himself is his own greatest literary creation and legacy. Justin is entirely justified in asserting that the phenomenon of literary, self-created Poe extends well beyond the usual boundaries of literature. What other writer has had a National Football League franchise named for one of his works?

Probably inevitably in a general work of such scope and breadth, there is some repetition and some overstatement of the obvious, but overall the book is original and elegantly written. It will be a necessary addition to every good collection of works about Poe.