At the Cenacle Convent in London, while helping the nuns to clean out a cupboard, Rumer Godden recently came upon a little volume of poems written by the French poet Carmen Bernos de Gasztold and published in a small edition by the "Editions du Cloître." She later found that this is the private press of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Louis du Temple at Limonpar-Igny, France, and that the poet lives and works there. She recognized the poems as a work of exceptional genius and exquisite charm, and immediately resolved to translate them. Rumer Godden says that she has seldom had more rewarding hours than those spent working over these poems, first at Stanbrook Abbey in England, and then with Carmen Bernos de Gasztold herself at the Benedictine Abbey in France. The twenty-seven poems, each a simple prayer by one of the animals in Noah's Ark, are a rare combination of devotion, grace, and wit. In their unpretentious way they speak both touchingly and profoundly.
Rumer Godden's own gifts as a poet have been expressed in two well-loved narrative poems: In Noah's Ark, which the Saturday Review called "a small masterpiece—stimulating, beautifully artistic, and wholly satisfying," and St. Jerome and the Lion, a story in verse for all ages. With the sympathy for animals, the wit and gentle irony which both these poems displayed, it is not surprising that Miss Godden felt a special affinity with the work of Carmen Bernos when she found it, and this fellow feeling illumines her translations, a work of genius in themselves. With the Jean Primrose illustrations they should enchant a great many readers.
—from the dust jacket
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