French literature Archives

French literature

This Garment Called Life

By Hélène Bessette, from Lili Is Crying, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the French by Kate Briggs. It’s like this, says Lili. I left…

Poetic License

by Walter Benjamin,

From “Notes on Baudelaire’s Parisian Tableaux,” which was published for the first time in English in the Fall 2024 issue of October. Translated from the French by Michael Krimper. Baudelaire…

Voltaire in Vichy

by Jean Guéhenno,Translated by David Ball,

By Jean Guéhenno, from Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, out this month from Oxford University Press. Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a writer,…