René Char

Keväällä 1930 runoilijat André Breton, Paul Éluard ja vastikään surrealistien riveihin astunut nuori René Char kiertelivät pitkin poikin Etelä-Ranskaa, ja keksivät kirjoittaa on the road – kahviloissa, halvoissa hotelleissa, autossa – kolmiäänisen runokokoelman ihana raato -seuraleikin tapaan, missä seuraava jatkaa siitä, mihin edellinen lopettaa... Tuloksena syntyi surrealistisen sanataiteen pieni klassikko, kollektiivisen ilmaisun virkistävä tuotos, jonka rikas kuvasto sekä eriskummaiset oivallukset yllättävät yhä tänä päivänä. Tekijät ovat varustaneet kirjan esipuheillaan, ja Éluard lausuu omassaan osuvasti: ”Pikemmin kuin inspiroitunut, runoilija on se joka inspiroi...”

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.

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.

Från René Chars omfattande lyriska författarskap presenteras här för första gången på svenska en hel diktsamling, Sånger från La Balandrane (1977) i tolkning av Maja Thrane och Erik Bergqvist. Det rör sig, som alltid hos Char, om en starkt förtätad poesi; icke klassicistisk, samtidigt tvär och mild, sträng och fri, på en gång poetik och utsaga om människors villkor. Efterord av Madeleine Gustafsson.

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

Rene Char (1907 - 88) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A member of the surrealists in the early 1930s, he became increasingly preoccupied by the rise of Nazi Germany and later played a key role in the French Resistance. Hypnos is both a document of unique importance in the history of the French Resistance and a classic of modern European literature. Based on a journal Char kept during his time in the Maquis, it is composed of short prose fragments that range from abrupt and sometimes enigmatic meditations in which the poet seeks out his metaphysical and moral compass bearings in the darkness of occupied France to narrative descriptions that throw into stark relief the dramatic and often tragic nature of the decisions he had to confront as the head of his Resistance cell. A tribute to the individual men and women who fought at his side, the book is also a celebration of the power of art to combat terror and to transform our lives. Char had significant influence on the generation of French poets who came of age after World War II and was an important figure for a host of distinguished contemporaries, including Albert Camus, Julien Gracq, Edmond Jabes, Octavio Paz, Nicolas de Stael, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, as well as for younger writers like Peter Handke and Hans-Magnus Enzenberger, and the composer Pierre Boulez, who has set several of his poems to music.

The Word as Archipelago is the first complete translation into English of La Parole en archipel, an important book that René Char published in 1962, and a book whose title is an apt figure for the whole body of poetry that Char wrote over a period of fifty years. The author of this book is a lover, a visionary of the natural world, an elegist, a phenomenologist of encounter, a mystic of the night, a spirit of defiant freedom who in the Second World War had been a leader in the French Resistance. The book includes work in the different forms Char fluently moves among-the verse poem, the prose poem, and the aphoristic sequence-and displays his characteristic stylistic gifts: vivid concreteness, speculative incisiveness, archipelago-like scope. The word is an island belonging to a unity always partially hidden. Robert Baker's resonant translation brings into English this language of intuitive crossings. A poet of pessimism and hope at once, perhaps the greatest French practitioner of the prose poem since Rimbaud, Char writes a beautifully open poetry of his avventura amorosa with life itself.

Rene Char (1907-1988) was one of France's most respected 20th century poets. Part of the Surrealist group in the late 1920's-1930's, he gradually drifted away from the group. During WWII he joined the resistance and wrote his forceful prose poems describing what he saw and experienced. This large, bilingual anthology, includes all of his well known books Feuillets d'Hypnos and Fureur et Mystere as well as a sampling of other poems and prose poems. Insightful essays are provided by Sandra Bermann, Mary Ann Caws, and Nancy Kline.

“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