Written while Jean Grosjean was a prisoner in the Second World War, Terre du temps, his first book, was published by Gallimard in 1946 and attracted a great deal of attention. It was awarded the Prix de la Pl'iade. Between lyric and meditation on Biblical themes, the poems work up to a personal apocalypse. Jean Grosjean was born in 1912. He became a Roman Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in 1950. He is a noted translator from Near Eastern and other languages: the Koran, books of the New and Old Testaments, the Pl'iade editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare. To date, he has published a dozen books of poetry, of which Fils de l'Homme (1954) received the Prix Max Jacob; El'gies (1967), the Prix des Critiques. He is included in Gallimard's popular pocket series Po'sie. He has also published twelve works of fiction. For a number of years, from 1967, he was one of the editors of the Nouvelle Revue fran]aise. He died in Versailles, in 2006. Paradigm Press in Providence has published Elegies in Keith Waldrop's translation.
