hat. ‘Everything God does He does well, and would have left me my hair if He intended to protect me’. There is no known grave. The sobriquet ‘The Lycanthrope’, now universally applied to references to Borel, and the subtitle of Starkie’s biography, was originally simply Borel’s own opinion of his powers and desire to attack conventional society, tyrants, Classicism, traditionalism etc. Borel wrote a short story entitled ‘Champavert le Lycanthrope’, professedly autobiographical, in his collection Immoral Tales (1838). The wild seductions, knifings, general bloodshed, sadism, sexual shenanigans, corpses, dissections etc. in these stories have subsumed the nickname into something simply creepy. His portrait, thin, darkly besuited, his right hand on the head of a great hound, helps.

*

These poems were translated by the method used for The Song Atlas and 52 Euros (both Carcanet anthologies): a native speaker, in this case my brother Kurt Gänzl, translated each word, line, verse and poem into meticulous and practical English; I then ‘re-poemed’ them. I have no beliefs, or even opinions, on the matter of translation, its theory or practise: if a poet gives his/her all to a translation, it will be rather like that poet’s own work. It is better that a reader gets my fullthrottled versions of Petrus Borel than a hesitant attempt to copy rhyme, rhythm, structure or contemporary contexts, which will, and cannot help but, lower the percentage of drive.

For the life of Petrus Borel there is really only, in English, Petrus Borel: the Lycanthrope by Dame Enid Starkie (Faber and Faber, 1954). The French text of Rhapsodies can be read in Wikisource.

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