Cinepoems and Others

Benjamin Fondane (1898-1945) was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerfully lyric poetic style: a near-surrealist who embraced and produced his own version of existential philosophy: a Romanian poet who wrote in French: a self-consciously Jewish poet of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy, just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, where he was gassed and murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of a plenitude, an overflowing. Writers as diverse as Jean Cocteau and the Russian philosopher Leonid Shestov praised Fondane's work during his lifetime: Man Ray photographed Fondane: Lionel Abel translated him and published his work in The Partisan Review, during The Partisan Review's heyday. After his death in the Shoah, the poetry might have been forgotten, had not writers like E M Cioran kept the memory of the work alive; now in France, Fondane's poetry is again widely available. American readers will be struck by Fondane's composition of the Cine-poems, poems in the form of film scripts, which, in their gesture towards the silence of the image, employ words at the same moment as they despair of them, and as they participate in the surrealist discourse of the 1920's. Just as striking is the philosophical vein of thought that runs through Fondane's poems, as he interrogates the possibility of poetic knowledge. Always Fondane's lyricism - effusive, tragic, charismatic, irresistible, Eastern European - drives the writing. Finally, Fondane's secular/mystical Judaism, and his embrace of Jerusalem over Athens, grounds his poetry in the calamity - and imaginative triumph - of European Jewry. This is the first book-length translation of Fondane's poetry into English. Poems included in this collection are translated by Mitch Abidor, Marianne Bailey, E M Cioran, Joseph Donahue, Eric Freedman, Henry King, Andrew Rubens, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, and Leonard Schwartz.

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About Benjamin Fondane