Jonathan Chaves

Selected Poems of Jules Breton

Arts & Literature

“Sharon Mooney, whose book of ekphrastic poems inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings established her as a master of the sonnet, now shows that she is a literary translator of the highest order. Jules Breton’s poems, though fluent in diction, are tight and dense in imagery, rendering them particularly difficult to translate into English, let alone English that echoes the rhymes of the originals. Mooney’s renditions have the musical flow that characterizes the French poems and brings them fully into life in English. This is a small masterpiece of literary translation.”