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Every Minute is First: Selected Late Poems

Marie-Claire Bancquart

translated by Jody Gladding

Milkweed Editions, 2024

A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.

This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, formerly French Voices, a program created by Villa Albertine.

Pink: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau

translated by Jody Gladding

Princeton University Press, 2025

Pink has such powerful associations today that it’s hard to imagine the color could ever have meant anything different. But it’s only since the introduction of the Barbie doll in 1959 that pink has become decisively feminized. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, pink was frequently masculine, and the color has signified many things beyond gender over the course of its long history—from the prim to the vulgar, and from the romantic to the eccentric. In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of pink in the West, from antiquity to today.

Pink pigments first appear in ancient Macedonian paintings, but it was not until the eighteenth century that vivid, saturated pinks were developed for dyeing and painting. At the same time, a popular new flower—the pink rose—finally gave the color a standard name, and pink, assuming a place in everyday life, began to acquire its own symbolism, distinct from that of red, yellow, or white. Bringing the story up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Pink describes how the color, both adored and detested, became associated with many other things, from softness and pleasure to nudity and sex.

Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images, Pink is an entertaining and enlightening account of the evolving role and significance of the color in art, fashion, literature, religion, science, and everyday life across the millennia.

Other titles in the series:

White: The History of a Color

Yellow: The History of a Color

Red: The History of a Color

Green: The History of a Color

Black: The History of a Color

Read The New York Review of Books September 2014 review of Green here. 

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Occupation Journal

Jean Giono

translated by Jody Gladding

Archipelago Books, 2020

Written during the years of France’s occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France’s great literary minds during the country’s darkest hour. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s and 1940s – a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation – Giono spent the war in the town of Manosque in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his family. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature’s most voracious and critical minds.

Also by Jean Giono, translated by Jody Gladding:

The Serpent of Stars

Finalist for the 2004 French-American Foundation Translation Prize

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Novels by author Pierre Michon, translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays
          (from Yale University Press, Archipelago Books):

Rimbaud the Son

Click here for an interview with Jody Gladding on translating Rimbaud the Son.

The Eleven

Winner of the 2009 Académie française Grand Prix du roman

Small Lives

Winner of the 2009 French-American Foundation Translation Prize

Click here for an essay by Elizabeth Deshays on translating Small Lives.