Anabasis

Saint-John Perse was the pen name of Alexis Leger (1887 - 1975), a French poet and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. Perse's masterpiece, Anabase (Anabasis), was written while Perse was in China and published in 1924. ("Anabasis" is the Greek word for a journey into the interior.) It is a poem frequently compared to "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, who also prepared this definitive translation of Perse's poem. Anabasis is, Eliot writes in his preface, "a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of James Joyce."


This ebook edition contains the original French text, Eliot's preface and English translation, a bibliography, and additional essays by Valéry Larbaud, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, and Giuseppe Ungaretti.