It has been more than 40 years since Frankétienne published his first collections of poems, and exactly 40 years since the first book that garnered him some critical reception, Mûr à crever, was published. 1968 was also the year in which Gallimard released the great trilogy of Marie Chauvet, Amour, colère, et folie, that simultaneously closed and opened a double trend in Haitian fiction: “return to the country” and “exile.” Over the course of these years of persistent work, he published some forty volumes representing some ten thousand printed pages, becoming undoubtedly one of the most prolific Caribbean writers of the twentieth century, and one of the great figures of world literature that critics compare to James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Antonin Artaud, and François Rabelais, among others.

Jonassaint, Jean. On Frankétienne: The Course of an Opus. Translated by Christopher W. Lemelin and Mariana Past. Sirena: Poesia, Arte y Critica 1 (2008): 112-20.

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