Launching 'Paris 1935' by Jean Follain, translated by Kathleen Shields

Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 is an intimate, multilayered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.

‘ “It is good to cross Paris as though it were a village,” Jean Follain writes in the opening section of this prose work. And that is exactly what he goes on to do, refusing ever to see the city in terms of grand abstraction or civic ‘projects’, but always from intricate, surprising detail, the Paris of the petites gens. The unnamed wanderer encounters the city in its teeming particulars, not without irony, but always with compassion, and a strange intimate knowledge of the poor office workers walking with bowed heads, the little cobbler, the black-aproned watchmaker, the old servant woman weeping quietly in a public garden. Whether in poetry or prose, Follain is one of the great modern French writers, a secret garden waiting to be discovered by the curious. The publication of the first English edition of Paris, so nimbly translated by Kathleen Shields, is cause for joy.’

– Stephen Romer

Jean Follain (1903–71) was born in Canisy, Normandy. After studying law at Caen, he moved to Paris and worked as a barrister (avocat) then as a judge (magistrat) while pursuing a literary career. He published several poetry collections, including Exister (1947) and Espaces d’instants (1971), and prose works about places, Paris (1935), Canisy (1942) and Chef-lieu (1950). Follain knew Éluard and Aragon and was a close friend of Max Jacob. In 1970 he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française for his poetic work. While his poetry has been translated into other European languages his prose is not well known outside France.

Kathleen Shields taught English at French universities and worked on large bilingual dictionary projects in France and England (Larousse and Oxford-Hachette). For many years she lectured in French language and literature at Maynooth University, where she specialised in teaching translation at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. She has published extensively in the field of literary translation studies, most recently ‘Translation and Conflict: Ciaran Carson’s translations of Jean Follain’ in CompLit (November 2022). Paris 1935 is the first translation of Follain’s prose into English.