Desnos’s poem, in Lewis’s translation, must have influenced us all with its structural changes—stanzas, then none to speak of, prose interlude, line lists, then lovely curt goodbye. Its sense of a corrupt teeming world in which the only pure image exists in the lover’s (poet’s), heart though each member of the corrupt world is also that lover. I love this poem, and I salute the fiftieth anniversary of the translation’s publication, remembering when Lewis was working on it in ’71, deeply bemused by the fact of the undertaking. So he changed “métamorphoses” to “changes,” because we all spoke of our “changes,” the “change” in our pockets, “all my changes” (Neil Young). And sometimes I know the translator’s simply talking about himself. Is the poet doing that too? Is the reader?
—Alice Notley

Warsh’s translation of Desnos’s dream-chant-poem-cloud is a personal translation; it testifies to translation as a mode of reading: we can only translate what we can read. Now side by side with Desnos’s French, we see how Warsh alters words, misses pronouns, creates new visions out of the original at times but always captures its incantatory rhythm and beauty and starfulness, the grandeur of its lament. Warsh translated the poem as a young man, leaning deeply into the French with his eyes and muscles and arteries. Around him fifty years ago, poetry translators were mostly academics and translation was a way to grasp a work already seen as past. Warsh, poet, translates Desnos to bring the poem into the present, his present and ours, feverishly alive, as poem not of the past but of the future. It is wonderful to have this celebratory volume and admire his work fifty years later.
—Erín Moure

Roland Barthes has noted “the discourse of the lover’s absence” as also being present as allocutory, edging between two tenses, past and present, keeping you on your toes. They are forever here, those lost bodies of beloved Others, and poetry lives on through loveless nights. Desnos caught his night stunningly in formal and luxurious French pressing hard on Avant breakthrough, addressing the lover in tantalizing lament, flourishing insomniacal language. He suffered Nazi murder and I think Warsh, in his translation—a young evolving poet’s tender cri de coeur on the back of Desnos—felt spirit connection to the Jewish poet. The new afterword by its original publisher, David Rosenberg, is a generous and brotherly asset. I love and lived this poem’s untethered shadowing.
—Anne Waldman

Gentle pleasures are hard to come by. This book is one. Lewis Warsh, always a delicate and romantic poet, writes with the speed of intuition. He captures in his translation of Desnos the same music, almost arbitrary in its liberties. Night is a cloak to compose such poetry in. And so it adapts to the conditions it is given, dark and wicked only to match the world at its worst. Desnos the surrealist slips around images with the delirium of half-sense. Baudelaire, Apollinaire, here they return to the reader at last, at the right time, again. The poems here are like silhouettes dashing out of the past and passing. A sparkling and taunting dance before the shadow of Hitler takes form.
—Fanny Howe

Robert Desnos was thirty the year The Night of Loveless Nights was first published. Lewis Warsh was very near the same age when he rendered it into English. Warsh was so in accord with Desnos’s long, passionate work that his own version is as expressive as any poem he ever wrote.
—John Godfrey

Winter Edition’s lovely new volume, Night of Loveless Nights, by Robert Desnos, translated by Lewis Warsh, is a must-read for students of Modernism and of how its torch has been passed on to Postmodern poets. … As the title suggests, the poem is a compression and compendium of all love-lorn tropes, the whole tradition going back to the 12th century in one poem, all the nights into one night. It’s a summing up and taking stock and emptying out so that at the end it can move on and call for revolt. …  If, as Pound says, all literary history is hero worship, then Desnos and Warsh are two such deserving heroes, and let us hie to the temple of poetry and buy this book!
—Joe Elliot, Poetry Project Newsletter

Through an epic drift of shifting moods, motifs, and styles, Desnos constrains or expands Surrealist automatism to include the alexandrine, one of the strictest self-conscious classical meters in rhyme. …. If some of Warsh’s version seems forced, it’s not from oversight or ineptitude, but rather from compelling the strictest of regimes to meet its own demands. Following Desnos, Warsh teaches rigorous classical verse to lilt, laugh, and utter nonsense (“utter” here being both superlative and verb).
—Geoffrey Hagenbuckle, Rain Taxi

For Warsh, this wasn’t a job, or even a scholarly exploration, but a rather personal matter, an attempt to understand his lineage, and the trajectory of the poetic tradition he was inheriting, while, at the same time, reworking it. […] Desnos may not have consciously set out to write a political poem, or a poem, associated, in any explicit way, with his ethnic roots: The dream of an overhaul of European consciousness was not unique to Jewish poets. Yet, it makes sense that as a cosmopolitan and multilingual artist, yearning to break away from his marginal, minority status, Desnos craved to transcend ossified categories for the sake of a fresh start.
—Jake Marmer, Tablet