The Jungle Poems of Leconte de Lisle

David R. Slavitt, award-winning author of more than 100 books of poetry and prose, translates the work of Charles Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle, a French poet associated with the Parnassian movement. To look at Leconte de Lisle now, writes Slavitt in the book’s introduction, is to discover a sensibility strikingly similar to that of Elizabeth Bishop (with Africa instead of Brazil as his mise en scene). In some ways, he reminds me, too, of Wallace Stevens, stuck up in the fog of Hartford and longing for the glare of the tropics (‘Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf’). He was an accomplished classicist who translated Homer’s Iliad and the ‘Eumenides’ of Aschylus. But it is as a poet that he fascinates me, and particularly as one whose technical abilities are impressive and whose subjects were often deliberately exotic and primitif.