Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was one of the most influential French writers of the second half of the twentieth century. His seminal works include Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, Criticism and Truth, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, and The Rustle of Language (1984). Richard Howard is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including Untitled Subjects, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He has published more than 150 translations from the French, including works by Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, Camus, De Beauvoir, De Gaulle, Breton, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Cioran, Claude Simon, Stendhal, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, for which he received the 1983 American Book Award for translation.
