René Char
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| French literature |
|---|
| By category |
| French literary history |
|
Medieval |
| French writers |
|
Chronological list |
| France portal |
| Literature portal |
René Char (June 14, 1907 – February 19, 1988) was a 20th century French poet.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks. He 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, Gerard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. He was large (1.92 m) and an active rugby player. After briefly working at Cavaillon, in 1927 he performed his military service in the artillery in Nîmes.
Char's first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922-1926. In early 1929, he founded the journal Méridiens with Andre Cayatte and published three issues. In August, he sent a twenty-six copies of his book Arsenal, published in Nîmes, to Paul Eluard, who in the autumn came to visit him at L'Isle sur la Sorgue. In late November, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. His "Profession de foi du sujet" was published in December in the twelfth issue of La Révolution surréaliste. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid 1930s onward.
Char joined the French Resistance in 1940, serving under the name of Captain Alexandre, where he commanded the Durance parachute drop zone. He wrote about these events in his prose poems Feuillets d'Hypnos in an extraordinary manner. During the fifties and sixties, despite brief and unhappy experiences in the theater and film, Char reached full maturity as a poet. In the 1960s he joined the battle against the stationing of atomic weapons in Provence. He died of a heart attack in 1988 in Paris. The Hotel Campredon (also known as the House Rene Char) in L'Isle sur la Sorgue is a public collection of his manuscripts, drawings, paintings, and objets d'art.
[edit] Better known works
- Arsenal (1929).
- Ralentir Travaux (1930 - in collaboration with André Breton and Paul Eluard).
- Artine (1930).
- L'action de la justice est éteinte (1931).
- Le marteau sans maître (1934).
- Moulin Premier (1936).
- Placard pour un chemin des écoliers (1937).
- Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (1938).
- Seuls demeurent (1943).
- le Poème pulvérisé (1945).
- Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946).
- Fureur et mystère (1948).
- Les Matinaux (1950).
- A une sérénité crispée (1951).
- Recherche de la base et du sommet (1955).
- La Parole en archipel (1962).
- Dans la pluie giboyeuse (1968).
- Le Nu perdu (1971).
- Aromates chasseurs (1976).
- Chants de la Balandrane (1977).
- Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (1979).
- Les voisinages de Van Gogh (1985).
- Éloge d'une soupçonnée (1988).
Char's Œuvres complètes were published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, in 1983 with an introduction by Jean Roudaut. An augmented posthumous re-edition appeared in 1995.
[edit] Trivia
Among the poets to translate his hermetic works into English are included William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, John Ashberry, W.S. Merwin, Cid Corman, Gustaf Sobin and Paul Auster; into German, Paul Celan and Peter Handke.
Char was a friend and close associate of Albert Camus,[1] Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot among writers, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Victor Brauner among painters 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.[2]
[edit] Further reading
- Ralentir Travaux: Slow Under Construction, Exact Change,U.S. 1992
- Selected Poems of Rene Char, New Directions Publishing Corporation 1992
- The Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems of Rene Char, Translated to English by Susanne Dubroff, 2004
[edit] References
- ^ juin_juill:Mise en page 1
- ^ Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit, 1994. Ch.23.
[edit] External links
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: René Char |
