Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) wrote three secret collections of verse, of
which `Femmes' and `Hombres' remained almost unobtainable even in France
until the 1970s. These strangely unrespectable poems celebrate the
pleasures of sex, with women and men respectively, in loving detail –
reversing the old view of Verlaine as a limp impressionist. Alistair
Elliot's metrical translations brilliantly echo the vigour, good humour
and skill of the originals, which accompany them in this bilingual
edition.

Alistair Elliot is a freelance poet and verse translator, born in
Liverpool in 1932. `My Country', his collected poems, came out in 1989.
His `Italian Landscape Poems' and his translation of Euripedes' `Medea',
made for the Almeida Theatre and Diana Rigg, appeared in 1993. He has also
published as parallel texts a version of Heine's `Lazarus Poems', a
selection of `French Love Poems', Valéry's `La Jeune Parque', and an
annotated edition of Virgil's and Dryden's `Georgics'. His selection of
`Roman Food Poems', translations from the great Roman poets about the
basis of society, what we eat and how we eat it, came out in 2003. He
lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.