Selected Poems of Jules Breton
From the Letters of Vincent van Gogh
by Jules Breton
Translated by Sharon Fish Mooney
Imprint: Resource Publications
82 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.16 in
- Paperback
- 9798385215409
- Published: August 2024
$11.00 / £9.00 / AU$17.00
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Vincent van Gogh loved both art and poetry. He especially loved the nineteenth-century Realist art and French poetry of Jules Adolphe Aime Louis Breton (1827-1906). Both Breton's art and poetry focused on the French countryside, peasant themes and, at times, his Christian faith. Van Gogh copied a number of Breton's poems and sent them in letters to his brother, Theo, and to Anthon van Rappard, an artist friend. He also promised to send Breton's complete book of poems, Les Champs et la mer /The Fields and the Sea ) to Theo. This book includes Breton's original poems Van Gogh copied with translations and commentary on each poem by the translator. Most of Breton's poems were dedicated to fellow artists or poets. These metrical translations reflect the rhyme and meter of the original French poems. Breton became well known in America for his 1884 oil on canvas, Le chant de l'alouette/The Song of the Lark (Henry Field Memorial Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago). It was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934 where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt stated it was her own favorite painting. This book's aim is to introduce Breton's poetry to the English-speaking world.
Sharon Fish Mooney is author of Bending Toward Heaven: Poems After the Art of Vincent van Gogh and editor of A Rustling and Waking Within, an ekphrastic poetry anthology. Her own poetry and poetry translations have been published in various journals and anthologies. She has lectured on Van Gogh and Breton in the United States, Canada, The Netherlands, and France and lives in Ohio with her husband, Scott, also a poet.
“Sharon Mooney, whose book of ekphrastic poems inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings established her as a master of the sonnet, now shows that she is a literary translator of the highest order. Jules Breton’s poems, though fluent in diction, are tight and dense in imagery, rendering them particularly difficult to translate into English, let alone English that echoes the rhymes of the originals. Mooney’s renditions have the musical flow that characterizes the French poems and brings them fully into life in English. This is a small masterpiece of literary translation.”
—Jonathan Chaves, professor of Chinese, The George Washington University
“Jules Breton was as gifted with the pen as he was with the brush. We have seen the beauty of his paintings, and now, thanks to Sharon Fish Mooney’s masterful translations, we can also see the beauty of his poetry. The translator’s gifts have gifted us with the gifts of this great and under-appreciated poet. May her work make his work as well known and well-loved as it deserves to be.”
—Joseph Pearce, editor, St. Austin Review
“Sharon Mooney’s idea of translating the poems found in Van Gogh’s letters was an inspiration. They’re all very good poems, some of them breathtakingly beautiful. Though Mooney took great care in fashioning her English versions, they read as though they’d been written effortlessly, appearing on the page fully realized. Her commentary shows Breton at the center of a vibrant creative circle, generous in his admiration of his peers, and worthy of their admiration and ours.”
—Alfred Nicol, poet and translator of One Hundred Visions of War
“Selected Poems of Jules Breton is a valuable introduction to the work of a French painter-poet adored by Vincent Van Gogh and yet virtually unknown to English readers. Sharon Mooney’s masterful metrical translations and insightful commentary on this ‘poet with the pen as well as with the brush’ offer us an intriguing window into the intimate relationship between painting and poetry.”
—Katherine M. Hedeen, professor of Spanish and literary translation, Kenyon College
“This small volume is a treasure trove of verse and imagery. Sharon Mooney’s adept translations of Breton’s poems are a pleasure to read, and her commentaries are insightful. From the still-life of Autumn to the ‘Shadows . . . tinged / All around with a golden thread’ in Twilight, these poems invite us to savor Breton’s meditative perspective on rural life, and they also deepen our understanding of Van Gogh both as a person and as an artist.”
—Molly Lynde-Recchia, professor of French, Western Michigan University
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