Written in 1923,
Green Wheat
is set in a villa in Brittany and is a story of burgeoning sexuality. This edition does more than meet Rogow’s mark "to do justice to Colette’s enormous talent," it presents a great classic to the world once again.
From the Translator’s Preface:
Of her more than twenty books,
is perhaps Colette’s most polished, most perfect. It was in Green Wheat that she achieved an exquisite blend of two of her greatest gifts as a fiction writer—her uncanny ability to fathom the hearts of adolescents, and her skill at describing nature with the phrasing of a poet and the colors and light of a great landscape painter. This combination helps make
one of the enduring works of fiction of the last 100 years. . . . Ultimately, the book is a story about the loss of Eden, both of youth and of nature. . . . It is about the loss of a type of hope, a hope that many of us cling to, that love can somehow escape the imperfections of life.
Zack Rogow translates French literature and was a co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award for
Earthlight
, by André Breton, as well as winner of a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for his translation of George Sand’s novel,
Horace
. He is the editor of a new anthology of U.S. poetry,
The Face of Poetry
, to be published by University of California Press in 2004. He teaches in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at the California College of Arts & Crafts and lives in San Francisco.
Colette, whose real name was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was born in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy, France in 1873 and died in Paris in 1954. Her many books include
Gigi
(1944),
The Vagabond
(1912),
Cheri
(1929), and
The Last of Cheri
(1932). She is considered one of the great novelists of the 20th century. Among her many awards, Colette was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy in the 1930s and was also the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. In 1953 she became a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. She is a legendary figure who lived a colorful and bohemian life and her writings are rich with the joys and pain