Complete Late Poetry of Jean-joseph Rabearivelo: A Facing-page Translation from the Malagasy and French into English

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937) is generally acknowledged, in his own country and abroad, as the greatest twentieth-century poet of Madagascar. Many of his poems have been included in anthologies of African poetry. The present volume contains the first complete translation from Malagasy of Rabearivelo's late poetry. Rabearivelo asserted that the poems in these two collections were written originally in Malagasy and then translated by him into French. Until now, the published translations into English and other languages of selections from these works were done from the French texts, rather than from the Malagasy ones. Included here, as well, is the first complete translation of the poet's last work, "Vielles Chansons des Pays d'Imerina" (published posthumously in 1939), which consists of French translations and adaptations of a highly refined and metaphorically complex form of Malagasy oral poetry.