No Matter No Fact

“A poem,” according to Alain Bosquet, “is an exacting friend.” Poet, literary editor of Le Monde, and a central fact of French intellectual life, Bosquet (1919-1998) is himself exacting. He demands a “simple, direct, ambitious poetry” and seeks to invent “new rapports between man and the universe, man and the void, man and himself.” Selected by Bosquet, the poems in No Matter No Fact are translated by Samuel Beckett, Edouard Roditi, and the author himself. Denise Levertov as well as Edouard Roditi contribute revised versions of some of the author’s translations. The poems share a poignancy brewed of wit and culture, beauty and sorrow. “Soon,” Bosquet muses in one poem, “there will be a single word/for poem and reality.” Bosquet’s poems “are perfectly beautiful,” André Breton believed, admiring “their contours and their sensitive approach.”