Alain Bosquet

Alain Bosquet, opprinnelig Anatolij Bisk, ble født i Odessa i Ukraina i 1919 og døde i Paris i 1998. Bosquet er et av de store navnene i moderne fransk poesi. Hans aforismer, eller mer dekkende, anti-aforismer – i og med at de unndrar seg å søke etter det rammende eller elokvente ved poenget – er gåtefulle og skarpe på en og samme tid. Dette storslåtte overskuddet, alle disse lesegledene Duggvokteren byr på, gjør oss klokere, mer forvirret, mer vitebegjærlige, ja, Bosquets henvendelser, denne poetens uutgrunnelige klarhet, gjør oss mer hengivne.Gjendiktet av Charlotte Vaillot Knudsen og med etterord av Rune Christiansen.

Ohio University Press published a first volume of Alain Bosquet’s work, Selected Poems, in 1973. Since then, the avant-garde and metaphysical poetry of Bosquet has become widely available to an international audience. Such eminent poets as Paul Celan, Vasko Popa, Octavio Paz, and Ismail Kadare have translated his work into German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Albanian. Writers who have translated his poetry into English include Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Denise Levertov, Louis Zukowski, Denis Devlin and Wallace Fowlie. This current collection, God’s Torment, has appeared in Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Dutch, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian and Catalan.

"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," Andr Breton believed, admiring "their contours and their sensitive approach."