The Inventors

Gathered together by the translator as a companion volume to his edition of René Char’s war-time journal, Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance (1943–44), the forty or so poems presented here are a representative cross-section of the poet’s mature work. The opening poem comes from a chapbook published in 1936 and dedicated to the children of Spain; the last in date, from a small volume published posthumously in 1988. All three genres characteristic of Char’s work are represented: poems in verse, poems in prose and the abrupt, lapidary ‘propositions’ for which he is best known, maxima sententia that combine the terseness of La Rochefoucauld with the probing and sometimes riddling character of the fragments of Heraclitus.

Neither free translations in the manner of Robert Lowell’s Imitations, nor cribs that hunker down in the shadow of a facing page, these vigorous new translations manage to stay remarkably close to the letter of the original, while at the same time conveying much of the French poems’ music and beauty, those rhythms and ‘breath-turns’ as intimate to a poet’s style as a human footprint. As one early reader put it: ‘This is English poetry masquerading as brilliant translation’.

The poems come with a brief introduction to Char’s life and work, and a series of notes setting out the back-stories behind some of the poems and pointing up allusions which may not be immediately familiar to the English-speaking reader.