Charles Péguy – författare

"'Peguy's deeply moving work reminds us that theology is not an intellectual option of the religious life, but a poetic drama, a working out in a pattern of words, symbols and images of the infinite complexity of God's care for His creation through every aspect of our existence, but above all in the life of the child, in its innocence and its unaffected joy.' David Jasper, University of Glasgow; 'Only a man of terrifying genius could have written this poem which is, first and last, a poem of consolation.' Noel Dermot O'Donoghue; 'A crisp translation of one of the greatest, and unjustly neglected, religious poems of the twentieth century. Peguy came to understand the value of Hope through suffering. Reading his inspired words makes that great spiritual power more concrete and richer for us.' Robert Royal, Ethics and Public Policy Center"

Translated by David L. Schindler, JrIn what is one of the greatest Catholic poetic works of our century, Peguy offers a comprehensive theology ordered around the often-neglected second virtue which is incarnated inhis celebrated image of the 'little girl Hope.

Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a French religious poet, philosophical essayist, publisher, social activist, Dreyfusard, and Catholic convert. There has recently been a renewed recognition of Peguy in France as a thinker of unique significance, a reconsideration inspired in large part by Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, which ranked him with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, however, access to Peguy has been hindered by a scarcity of translations of his work. This first complete translation of one of his most important prose works, with accompanying interpretive introduction and notes, will introduce English-speaking readers to a new voice, which speaks in a powerful and original way to a modern West in a condition of cultural and spiritual crisis. The immediate circumstance of the writing of this last prose essay, unfinished at the time of Peguy's early death, was the placing of Henri Bergson's philosophical works on the Catholic Index, and Peguy's undertaking to defend his former teacher from his critics, both Catholic and secular. But the subject of Bergson is also a springboard for the exploration of the perennial themes--philosophical, theological, and literary--most central to Peguy's thought.

Charles Peguy (1873–1914) is a French poet and essayist, whom Pierre Manent refers to as "one of the most penetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modern consciousness." Praised by T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill, among many others, Peguy's contemporary influence and importance has increased despite the infrequency with which readers find his work translated into English. As Roger Kimball remarks, Peguy was certainly "a creature of his time…[but] also a writer whose insights continue to resonate today" largely in part to Peguy's confrontation of modern hubris and his "rootedness in lived experience."Kathleen Curran Sweeney provides the English reader with a much needed translation of Peguy's long poem, Eve, first published in 1914. Considering Peguy's length and depth in Eve and its syllabic poetic meter, this is not an easy undertaking. Yet Sweeney manages to convey an authentic Peguy in English and at last provides access to Christ's discourse with Eve, an epic encounter that conveys literary genius enthralled with memory, charity, and the transformation of this contemplation in light of the theological perspective of the Incarnation and the redemption of man by God.