Four full-length plays by one of the greatest dramatists Europe has produced.Among the great figures who pioneered the modern movement in world literature, none showed himself more versatile than France's Jean Cocteau. Poet, novelist, critic, artist, actor, film-maker, Cocteau was also one of the greatest dramatists Europe has produced, with over a dozen plays which are frequently revived, not only in France, but in translation in many other countries. For this collection, fine translations of four full-length plays, one short play, and the "Speaker's Text" for the Cocteau-Stravinsky opera Oedipus Rex have been selected. The longer plays (The Infernal Machine, Orpheus, Bacchus, Knights of the Round Table) are re-creations of classic myth and legend—poetic and highly original interpretations of certain timeless themes which have inspired great drama through the ages. The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party is, by contrast, merely a "curtain-raiser," but remarkable as un jeu...

Film-maker, novelist, artist, playwright, entrepreneur, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) regarded himself above all as a poet. No matter how diverse or prolific his creativity, he saw poetry as central to his vision of all the arts. And it was as a poet that he began his career, publishing Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance in 1919, and it was in this vocation that he published Le Requiem in 1962, shortly before his death. While Cocteau's prose has found sympathetic translators, no substantial collection of his poetry exists in English. Drawing on poems from all stages of Cocteau's life, Jeremy Reed has rectified this deficiency by translating a generous selection of some of Cocteau's most durable poems.

Reflections on life and art from the legendary filmmaker-novelist-poet-genius. By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature of the twentieth century, and had worked with the foremost artists of his time, including Proust, Gide, Picasso and Stravinsky. This memoir tells the inside account of those achievements and of his glittering social circle. Cocteau writes about his childhood, about his development as an artist, and the peculiarity of the artist's life, about his dreams, friendships, pain, and laughter. He probes his motivations and explains his philosophies, giving intimate details in soaring prose. And sprinkled throughout are anecdotes about the elite and historic people he associated with. Beyond illuminating a truly remarkable life, The Difficulty of Being is an inspiring homage to the belief that art matters.From the Trade Paperback...

Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, which was first published in 1929, holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction.Written in a French style that long defied successful translation—Cocteau was always a poet no matter what we was writing—the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when this translation was completed by Rosamund Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Lehrmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter because for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroys them has the...