Summary

In "Nelligan: Some Poems Translated from the French," Carson loosely translates a series of poems by the Rimbauldian Quebecer poet, Émile Nelligan, whom Carson writes a brief biography for at the close of the chapbook. He was a poet "born into the evening of [his] life" — a poet of rather diminished and sad circumstances: he was diagnosed with dementia praecox (a catch-all term, in Freudian psychoanalysis, for schizophrenia) in 1899 following a breakdown, and lived "from that time until his death in 1941 as a patient of Saint-Bénoît Asylum, and then l'Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu." All the translated works in this chapbook come from Nelligan's Complete Poems, Edited by Réjean Robidoux and Paul Wyczynski, though Carson neglects to include the French originals; as such, it is difficult to tell, off the top of our heads, which of Nelligan's...