Selected Poetry and Prose of Évariste Parny: In English Translation, with French Text by Évariste Parny (review)

This book resurrects the work of a long-forgotten and little-read eighteenth-century white Créole poet. It presents, both in the original French and in English translation, an anthology of Évariste Parny’s published work, including verse and prose poetry, letters, and a narrative poem. A comprehensive and very readable Introduction by Françoise Lionnet covers: Parny’s life and passions in the Indian Ocean; gender, race, and sexuality in his poems; and his career and postcolonial legacies. Parny’s experiences in love are discussed, as are the ways in which ‘his truthful depiction [.. .] contributed to the authenticity’ of his Poésies érotiques (p. xvii). Lionnet gives a socio-political history of the Indian Ocean islands, which played a strategic role for the French colonial enterprise as well as providing inspiration for Parny’s work. The Introduction provides a brief background understanding of trade routes, slavery, racial stereotyping, and creolization, which helps the modern reader to appreciate overt and subtle arguments made within Parny’s Chansons madécasses as he demonstrates his ‘rebellion against the imperial process’ (p. xxxiv). The Introduction also proves interesting from the point of view of gender studies, with consideration made of how Parny bucked contemporary trends regarding the eroticization of foreign female bodies and communicated empathy and clarity ‘as he engages ironically with received ideas and erroneous European representations’ of gender and the objectification of women (p. xxiv). The editor clearly situates Parny as ‘open[ing] the way for twentieth-and twenty-first-century trends’ (p. xxxiii). In this vein, Lionnet also notes that Parny’s Chansons (which were set to music by Ravel in 1925) can now be found in various recordings on YouTube. In addition Lionnet offers, through close reading, brief interpretation of specific lines of Parny’s work. Discussion of how Parny breaks with established poetic practices and constraints of traditional form accompanies analysis of the poet’s satire and use of language and rhyme to highlight elements within his writing. This analysis informs the English translation of the works themselves. Although poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, the emphasis Parny attributes to certain words, lines, and images is often maintained here through compensation or substitution techniques (such as recreating rhyme or word placement, or by replacing rhyme with alliteration). Particularly interesting from the point of view of translation studies are Lionnet’s remarks that possible double meanings in Parny’s lines have been noted by a modern Reunionese readership, and that the Reunionese Creole translations of the Chansons ‘accentuate the ironic tone and the implicit contradictions of Parny’s descriptive vocabulary’ (p. xxvii). These interpretations have clearly been taken into consideration when translating the poems into English for this volume. Ultimately, the book underlines Parny’s significant role in francophone literary history; however, it is also a useful addition to the bookshelves of students of history, postcolonialism, gender studies, world literature, musicology, and even translation studies.