Suzanne Renaud wrote these adaptations just after the war, basing them on Bohemian sources collected in the nineteenth century by writer, historian and linguist K. J. Erben (1811-1870), who brought together many Czech or Slav songs, proverbs and tales in three collections published around 1840, which F. Sušil and F. Bartoš later enriched. As their letters attest, Correspondance (1947-1959), around 1952 Renaud and Henri Pourrat prepared an edition of these adaptations, but it was not published. This edition, whose second part includes the original collection in Czech, follows Pourrat’s classification. Renaud, a poet but also a musician, was able to translate rhyming songs that make no sense unless accompanied by their melodies, into poems sounding close to the originals. “As I loved them, so I picked them. If they lacked the music that accompanied them like a shadow, like the wind or the buzzing bees, perhaps they have not lost too much rhythm and colour to the breath of a foreign language. I put them in a jug full of cool water on the window sill, and there they are now waking up, facing the familiar horizon.” (Suzanne Renaud, preface).