Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013; A Bilingual Edition Hardcover – September 5, 2017

This should be required reading for English teachers, professors and just ordinary people who ever wondered what intense ment.

Absolutely beautiful. It’s so sad that people read Rupi Kaur in a world where this exists

Gavin Bowd's translations of Michel Houellebecq render him laconic and often dry, but the French verses are right nearby for those who can check Bowd's work. While the dryness can be off-pointing and sometimes feel a bit forced in its existential rumination, Houellebecq's complexity does come out in re-reading and a lyrical turn comes out that is often lacking in his more polemical fiction. Many people used to the polemics may find the lack of controversial politics in the poems either refreshing or suspect depending, but it does flesh Houellebecq out to me to have this decade-spanning collection in English.

Houellebecq's poetry is sincere, and that's surprising. He's an artist. Pure and angry.

I was surprised by this book, by how beautiful the poems are. And the translation is excellent.

The dual language, hardback edition earns five stars for me, not just because of the quality of Houellebecq's poetry on French and the series of alienated, urban lost souls he has given life to, but because the translation does not grate. It is one of the hardest things in the world to translate poetry or poetic writing, and reading translation from a language you are familiar with can be purgatorial. This is not the case here. Gavin Bond has managed to find some really excitingly equivalent voices to those of Houellebecq's French personae, and the translation is not just punctilious, but creative and appropriate.Unfortunately the Kindle edition, and it is so useful to have poetry in a pocketable form to keep you company on the tube or over breakfast, does not work. Following instructions to get the French text up always produces the same two lines in English. Quel dommage!

For any fan of Houellebecq, this book is a must-have. Beautiful edition, with opposing pages, with the original French on the left and the English translation on the right.

I have enjoyed reading this humorous yet quite dark collection of poems. The juxtaposition of the original French with the English translation is, however, very useful and quite revealing. It shows that however good the translation (and what do we mean by a good translation in this context), poetry undergoes something of a metamorphosis when put in a different language. Even to someone with as basic a command of French as I have, it's very clear that the original and the translation are two quite different beasts. Poetry is more than a collection of literal meanings, context (rhythm, juxtaposition etc) is everything. Houellebecqs originals have quite strong rhythms which are almost completely missing from the translation and so we could ask whether the English versions are the poems he wrote or whether what we have here are poems paraphrased. To see how important this is imagine a poem written in English but then reorganised so as to change the rhythm...... do we have the same poem? I don't envy the translators job, as they have to choose whether to go for literal or structural fidelity (as I'm sure it's rare that the two coincide). I think that the translator has given us an interesting set of poems worth reading, but don't be fooled into thinking you are reading Houellebecq.

There are moments in this that are good. Much of its is a bit uninspiring. Houellebecq did the right thing focusing on novels, at which he is brilliant.

Great collection - Houellebecq is a genius.