René Char

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René Char
Char in 1941
Char in 1941
BornRené Émile Char
(1907-06-14)14 June 1907
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France
Died19 February 1988(1988-02-19) (aged 80)
Paris, France
OccupationPoet
NationalityFrench
Period1920–1940
GenrePoetry

René Émile Char (French: [ʃaʁ]; 14 June 1907 – 19 February 1988) was a French poet and member of the French Resistance.

Biography

Char was born in

German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. He was tall (1.92 m) and was an active rugby player. After briefly working at Cavaillon, in 1927 he performed his military service in the artillery in Nîmes
.

His first book, Cloches sur le cœur, was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926.

Vieira da Silva
.

Char joined the

atomic weapons in Provence. He died of a heart attack in 1988 in Paris. The Hotel Campredon (also known as the Maison René Char) in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
was a public collection of his manuscripts, drawings, paintings and objets d'art, until 2016.

Char was a friend and close associate of the writers Albert Camus,[2][1] Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and of the artists Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Victor Brauner. He was to have been in the car involved in the accident that killed both Camus and Michel 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 Le Thor in the Vaucluse.[3]

Notable works

  • Ralentir Travaux (1930 – in collaboration with André Breton and Paul Éluard)
  • Le Marteau sans maître (1934)
  • Moulin premier (1936)
  • Placard pour un chemin des écoliers (1937)
  • Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (1938)
  • Seuls demeurent (1945)
  • Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946)
  • Le Poème pulvérisé (1947)
  • Fureur et mystère (1948)
  • Les Matinaux (1950)
  • Recherche de la base et du sommet (1955)
  • La Parole en archipel (1962)
  • L'Âge cassant (1965)
  • Dans la Pluie giboyeuse (1968)
  • Le Nu perdu (1971)
  • La Nuit talismanique (1972)
  • Le Bâton de rosier
  • Aromates chasseurs (1976)
  • Chants de la Balandrane (1977)
  • Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (1979)
  • Loin de nos cendres (1983)
  • Les voisinages de Van Gogh (1985)
  • Éloge d'une soupçonnée (1988)

Char's Œuvres complètes were published in the prestigious

Gallimard) in 1983 with an introduction by Jean Roudaut
. An augmented posthumous re-edition appeared in 1995.

Translations

Among the poets to translate his hermetic works into English are William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Cid Corman, Gustaf Sobin, Kevin Hart (poet) and Paul Auster. Translators into German have included Paul Celan and Peter Handke. Translators into Bulgarian include Georgi Mitzkov and Zlatozar Petrov.

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-1-884964-36-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )
  2. ^ juin_juill:Mise en page 1
  3. ^ Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit, 1994. Ch. 23.

Selections in English

Criticism

External links