No Siege is Absolute: Versions of Rene Char

by René Char, Franz Wright (Translator)

poetry, tr Franz Wright

Genres: Poetry

39 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1984

About the author

René Char spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.

His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's work appeared in various editions, often with artwork by notable figures, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse and Vieira da Silva.

Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Nicolas de Staël, Georges Braque and Victor Brauner among painters. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed both Camus and Gallimard, but there was not enough room, and returned instead that day by train to Paris.

The composer Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le visage nuptial, and Le marteau sans maître. A late friendship developed also between Char and Martin Heidegger, who described Char's poetry as "a tour de force into the ineffable" and was repeatedly his guest at La Thor in the Vaucluse.

Reviews

[Maria]

You have done nothing but add to the weight of your night. You've gone back to fishing from the walls, to the dog-days without a summer. You are furious with your love at the eye of an agreement changing to panic. Think of the perfect house you will never see built. When is the harvest of the abyss? [...] Who was it that lifted you up, one more time, a bit higher, but without convincing you?

— from I Live in a Pain

I wish my grief, so old, were like the gravel in the river: all at the bottom. My currents would be clear of care.

— from Scented Hunter [Orion to the Unicorn]

What sophisticated barbarism will make its demands on us tomorrow? Taking into account that what existed before us is at present just ahead, like an orchid bleeding through a winter garden's caesarean.

[...]

An authoritarian science is divorcing itself from its modest sisters and taunts life's miracle, from which it makes a money of fear. Always the idea perverting the object.

[...]

We are this space in its erosion. We return to the aerial day and to its dark elation.

[...]

When I was young, the world was a blank white chaos of rebellious jutting glaciers. Today, it is a chaos bleeding and swollen, where the most gifted are masters of nothing but their own swelling.

— from Loins [Orion swims Eridanus and encounters the Hydra]

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no French here, and I've not gone to look, but these have a quicksilver verbal sharpness I like, always tuning in to a shifting object of address. "Our present has reached such a degree of inflammation that to invoke it is to praise the wind."

[Brandon Montgomery · Rating 2 out of 5]

There simply isn't much here. 30-odd pages of very short semi-surrealist poems you forget as soon as you finish.

[Puurojohannes]

Je ne parle. Suomennoksia vaan odottelen...