Hypnos
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A hero of the WWII French Resistance and an esteemed poet with Surrealist roots, Char (1907-88) composed this beautiful work by quarrying and condensing phrases, sentences, and paragraphs from the secret notebooks he kept during the war. The result 238 brief prose units, published in French in 1946 mixes harrowing anecdotes about executions, parachute drops, and clandestine meetings; evocative, mysterious single phrases; and good, if sometimes portentous, advice. "You don't need to love your fellow men to be of real help to them," Char says; "All you need is to wish... to prolong for a second some agreeable moment in their lives." His proclamations at once practical and ambitious, secular but sublime connect Char less to other poets than to other wartime essayists, especially to his friend Albert Camus. (When Char lets the Nazis kill a prisoner, in order to prevent them from razing a village, we hear his reasons and we feel his regret.) Yet Char was a frighteningly inventive, dense poet, and his fiery images come through, too: "the present" is, for him, "an embattled parapet" from which you might "Sing your iridescent thirst." Mark Hutchinson's new translation keeps Char's prose vividly concise, yet somehow a bit apart from Anglophone rhythms, as befits such a proudly French work.
