Although he himself considered poetry his true vocation, Pierre Jean Jouve is better known as a novelist. His more successful works in this genre include: Paulina 1880 (1925; translated, 1973), Le Monde désert (1927; translated as The Desert World, 1996), La Scène capitale (Capital Scene, 1935), and Hélène (1936; translated, 1993). In addition to his own creations, Jouve was interested in the poetry of others, translating many sonnets from William Shakespeare, poems from Friedrich Hölderlin, and several from his near-contemporaries Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale.

Jouve was born 11 October 1887 in Arras, the middle-class agricultural environment of which did not suit him, as he recalls in the autobiographical En Miroir: Journal sans date (In the Mirror: Journal without a Date, 1954): "Dans Arras je revois une enfance généralement triste" (In Arras I look back on a rather sad childhood). His father, Alfred Jouve, was...