Fe-Lines: French Cat Poems through the Ages - Softcover

"With beautiful illustrations and poems of every age and form, this book will please everyone (except dog lovers)."--World Literature Today "What makes a cat poem appealing to the reader? One of the salient features that I took from Fe-Lines is the constant desire to finish a poem with a 'menschliche Weisheit' (human insight of wisdom) that activates the reader's imagination and keeps the reader inside the movement of the poem. A major contribution to the field of letters and world literature."--Rainer Schulte, author of The Geography of Translation and Interpretation: Traveling between Languages "Norman Shapiro, a flute, harp, and violoncello of cat song, tells the crafty musical tale of the cat from medieval France until today. Shapiro, at his artistic apogee, created an English masterpiece in his Selected Lyrics of Theophile Gautier . But now with his Fe-Lines , he has invented a new genre, as T. S. Eliot did with Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats . The world is his pen. Who knows where the next Everest awaits him?"--Willis Barnstone, author of Moonbook and Sunbook

The French have long had a love affair with the cat, expressed through centuries of poetry portraying the animal's wit and wonder. Norman R. Shapiro lionizes the felines' limitless allure in this one-of-a-kind collection. Spanning centuries and styles, he draws on she-cats and toms, and an honor roll of French poets, well known and lesser known, who have served as their devoted champions. He reveals the remarkable range of French cat poems, with most works presented here for the first time in English translation. Scrupulously devoted to evoking the meaning and music of the originals, Shapiro also respects the works' formal structures. Pairing his translations with Olga Pastuchiv's elegant illustrations, Fe-Lines guides the reader through the marvels and inscrutabilities of the Mystique feline .