French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff & the Pen ed. and trans. by Norman Shapiro (review)

204Women in French Studies part, distracting the reader only with a frequently inconsistent use of verb contractions. In sum, this journey through various speakers' emotions in highly contrasting scenes uses its singular mix of narrative structure and painterly fragments to teach us to explore literature as an incomplete but necessary reflection of our everyday lives. For those interested in French poetry in translation, particularly in formal innovations such as the intermingling of poetry and prose, the integration of multiple voices and the layering of moments in space and time, all as a means of widely embracing human concerns, this volume is a compelling work by a major writer. It is a useful signpost for Anglophone readers wishing to discover Marie Etienne and related French and Francophone currents as well as to stay in touch with Marilyn Hacker's own considerable career. Aaron PrevotsSouthwestern University French Women Poets ofNine Centuries: The Distaff& the Pen. Selected and trans. Norman Shapiro. Intro. Roberta L. Krueger, Catherine Lafarge & Catherine Perry. Foreword. Rosanna Warren. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp [IJ-xlvi; 1182. ISBN 13 978-0-80188804 -5. $85.00 (Cloth). Award-winning translator of French poetry, theater, and fiction Norman Shapiro has brought forth an eloquent and erudite bilingual panorama of French women's poetic production spanning nine centuries. A veritable tour de force, Shapiro's volume is not only painstakingly researched and judiciously selected but also critically informed and carefully balanced throughout a chronological reconstruction of French women's poetic history. Excellent introductions, which frame and situate different generations of French women poets whose works have survived in quantity and diversity, precede each section of the tripartite volume: "The Middle Ages & the Renaissance" by Roberta L. Krueger, "The Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries" by Catherine Lafarge, and "The Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries" by Catherine Perry. Recovering the works of fifty-six poets across nine centuries while crossing between French and English languages and, at the same time, interweaving biographical, thematic, and aesthetic elements of analysis, French Women Poets ofNine Centuries: The Distaff& the Pen, to echo Roberta Warren's forward, implicitly rewrites French literary history. As a scholar of French literature, Norman Shapiro conceived this richly dialogic collection in response to the question "So? Where are all the women [poets]?" (xl). To share his quest for the French woman poet with a broad readership interested in French literature, women's writing, and the art of translation itself, Shapiro has produced English versions of the original French texts, which can indeed stand on their own artistically (xl-xli). Against the Book Reviews205 backdrop oftraditional reception history, then, Shapiro allows modern readers to discover anew scores of French women that productively wielded both distaff and pen. Though past literary convention relegated these accomplished poets to the margins, the aesthetic merit of their work, ever buttressed by Shapiro's masterful translations which draw on impressive lexical suppleness, shall continue to withstand the vagaries of reception—and the test oftime. In her marvelous introduction to Part One, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Roberta Krueger reveals the diversity and complexity of poetic production by women. "Exceptional in many ways" (3), women flourished as poets throughout this period of five centuries. Along with a detailed list of poetic "firsts and milestones," Krueger shows women and men in poetic dialogue ( 1 0), women approaching conventions of male poetry obliquely (12), and women collectively shaping intellectual history and the course of French poetry (19). Shapiro deftly populates the poetic stage set by Krueger in early Modern France to highlight the range and depth of roles played by women, without, however, allowing biographical literalism to preempt an encounter with their distinctive work selected for the volume. Meticulous research conducted in the literary archives and very recent scholarship allows Shapiro to ground critically his bio-bibliographical introductions to poets represented in this section, and throughout the volume, and thus raise various issues surrounding the recovery of women's poetic work against the grain ofthe canon. That Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Louise Labé, and the Desroches, for example, have representation in the volume is not surprising, considering how actively modern scholars have brought each of these poets critical notice. The inclusion of the Proven...