Rene Char - Böcker

The Selected Poems of René Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet’s wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugène Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry." Translated by Mark Hutchinson, The Inventors is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed Hypnos. It gathers more than forty poems that represent a cross-section of Char's mature work, spanning from 1936 to 1988. All three genres of Char's work are represented here: verse poems, prose poems, and the abrupt, lapidary propositions for which he is best known. These maxima sententia combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus. The Inventors includes a brief introduction to Char's life and work, as well as a series of notes on the backstories of the works, which explain allusions that may not be immediately familiar to the English-speaking reader. These new translations stay true to the originals, while at the same time conveying much of the music and beauty of the French poems. Praise for Rene Char "Char, I believe, is a poet who will tower over twentieth-century French poetry."-George Steiner

Now in paperback, René Char’s Hypnos is both a remarkable work of literature and a document of unique significance in the history of the French Resistance.Hailed by the poet Paul Eluard as an "absolute masterpiece" upon its first appearance in 1946, René Char’s Hypnos is both a remarkable work of literature and a document of unique significance in the history of the French Resistance. Based on a journal Char kept during his time in the Maquis, it ranges in style from abrupt and sometimes enigmatic reflections, in which the poet seeks to establish compass bearings in the darkness of Occupied France, to narrative descriptions that throw into vivid relief the dramatic and often tragic nature of the issues he had to confront as the head of his Resistance network. A tribute to the individual men and women who fought at his side, this volume is also a meditation on the white magic of poetry and a celebration of the power of beauty to combat terror and transform our lives.Translated into German by Paul Celan and into Italian by Vittorio Sereni, the book has never been carried over into English with the attention to style and detail that it deserves. Published in full here for the first time, this long-awaited new translation does justice at last to the incandescence and pathos of the original French.

René Char (1907-88) is one of the most important modern French poets. Admired by Heidegger for the profundity of his poetic philosophy, he was also a hero of the French Resistance and in the 1960s a militant anti-nuclear protester. Associated with the Surrealist movement for several years and a close friend of many painters – notably Braque, Giacometti and Picasso – he wrote poetry which miraculously, often challengingly, confronts the major 20th century moral, political and artistic concerns with a simplicity of vision and expression that owes much to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.Les Matinaux (1947-49) is perhaps his greatest collection. Published after the War, it looks forward to a better and freer world, whilst also bearing the marks of a deep-seated hatred of all fascisms. It includes some of the most beautiful love poems ever written in French. Michael Worton’s translations convey the essence of Char’s poetry (which says difficult things in a simple, traditional way), and his introduction suggests why Char is one of the vital voices of our age.

“René Char is the conscience of modern French poetry and also its calm of mind. Nancy Naomi Carlson, in these splendid translations, casts new light upon the sublime consequence of Char’s poetic character, and in Stone Lyre the case for sublimity is purely made.”—Donald Revell, poet and translator of Rimbaud and Apollinaire

In his foreword to Stone Lyre, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s previous collection of René Char translations, Ilya Kaminsky praised “the intensity, the dream-like language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames.”Stone Lyre was a selection of poems from Char’s numerous volumes of poems; Carlson’s new Hammer with No Master is a discrete and continuous work, the first English translation of Char’s Le marteau sans maître, first published in 1934 — a time of rumbling menace that our time resembles.