My Virtual French Summer: Encounters with Millennial French Poets

Abstract

After my Study Abroad program in Paris was cancelled due to COVID-19, I decided to travel to France in a different way: through a virtual literary lens. For several weeks throughout the summer of 2020, I scoured hundreds of Instagram accounts and scrolled through numerous online French literary magazines—Recours au poème, 17secondes, Revue la piscine, Levure littéraire, and Les Tas de mots—in an attempt to find a new generation of millennial poets working across various modes of experimentation. In this article I present bilingually in translation six poets—Adeline Duong, Arthur Fousse, Marie Allègre, Kenny Ozier-Lafontaine, Ada Mondès, and Thibault Marthouret—in the hope that their literary innovations and experiments may have an impact on the American literary canon.

Keywords:

• Poetry
• French poetry
• millennial poetry
• insta-poetry
• digital poetry
• translation

Notes

1 All translations from the French are my own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Constantine

Peter Constantine is Professor of Translation Studies and Director of the Program in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut. He is the publisher of World Poetry Books, and is editor-in-chief of the literary magazine New Poetry in Translation. His recent translations include works by Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010.

Emily Graham

Emily Graham is an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut. She is a double major in English and French, as well as a double minor in Film Studies and Literary Translation. She is currently reading and translating millennial French and Francophone poetry.