“The Beer Drinker,” a Poem by Jean Follain, Translated by Andrew Seguin
From the Collection Earthly: Selected Poems
“The Beer Drinker”
It’s the reader of detective novels
who also translated the Homeric epics;
he watches his glass redden
in the great sundown of Europe.
There are vapors wandering everywhere
which must be untangled;
there are men with organs full of holes, eaten up,
with radiating cancers
and all along the paths
these furrows of black earth where some dog dies.
Man of the North, he slowly drinks
a strong dark beer
whose bitterness goes well with the old gilded décor
and in a measured way
he grasps the handle of the mug
and brings it to his lips
this former schoolboy stained with violet ink,
he used to parade around
sticking out his illuminated tongue
in the courtyard in July
the lindens already yellow.
*
“Le Buveur de bière”
C’est le lecteur de romans policiers
qui pourtant traduisit les longs récits d’Homère ;
il voit son bock qui rougeoie
au grand coucher d’Europe.
Il y a partout de rôdantes vapeurs
qu’il faudrait délier;
il y a des hommes aux organes minés, troués,
aux cancers éclatants
et le long des chemins
ces sillons de terre noire où meurt quelque chien.
Homme du Nord, il boit lentement
une très forte bière
dont l’amer s’allie bien à l’or des vieux décors
et c’est avec mesure
qu’il prend l’anse du verre,
l’approche de ses lèvres
d’ancien collégien taché d’encre violette,
il paradait alors
montrant sa langue enluminée
dans la cour de Juillet aux tilleuls déjà jaunes.
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From Earthly: Selected Poems by Jean Follain, translated by Andrew Seguin, and published by The Song Cave this month (November, 2025).
Jean Follain and Andrew Seguin
Jean Follain (1903–1971) studied law at the Faculté de Caen and later became a magistrate. His first book of poems, La Main chaude, was published in 1933, and his first book of prose, Paris, in 1935. Follain published 12 subsequent volumes of poetry as well as several memoirs of his childhood. In 1970, Follain was awarded the highest honor by L’Académie Française, its Grand Prix du Poésie. Associated with a group that included Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy, Jean Follain was struck by a car and killed just after midnight in Paris in 1971, a brutal irony considering how many of his poems are rutted by farm carts and horse carriages and apple wagons.
Andrew Seguin is the author of The Room in Which I Work and the chapbooks NN and Black Anecdote, and co-translator, with Pierre Mabille, of the first French edition of Josef Albers’s Poems and Drawings. Andrew is a former Fulbright scholar and lives in New York City.
