Cinepoems and Others

Author: Fondane, Benjamin,Schwartz, Leonard,Leonard Schwartz
Publisher: The New York Review of Books, Inc
Category: Poetry By Individual Poets
Book Format: Paperback

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.

Table Of Contents
Introduction 2
Three Cine-Poems:
Maturing Eye-Lids 13

Mtasipol 19

Horizontal Bar 26
From Ulysses
VII 31

XXI 33

XXXVII 36
From Titanic (X) 38
The Sorrows of Ghosts 49
From Exodus 70
From Belshazzar's Feast 94
From Refusal of the Poem:
In the Time of the Poem 119

Refusal of the Poem 128

Fallen Snow 130

Elegies 132

Untitled
Post-face:
Interview with E. M. Cioran
About Benjamin Fondane
Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to France in 1923 to pursue his love of French poetry and culture. While at law school in Bucharest, he spent most of his time writing for avant-garde literary periodicals. In Paris, Fondane worked at an insurance company and for Paramount Pictures while establishing himself as a poet and philosopher writing in French. Under the guidance of the Russian émigré philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane became a leading exponent of existential philosophy in the 1930s. He also spent time in Argentina, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, lecturing on avant-garde film and directing a surrealist comedic film. In 1944, he was deported from France and killed at Auschwitz. In addition to Cinepoems and Others, New York Review Books publishes a volume of his selected essays, Existential Monday. Leonard Schwartz's two most recent collections of poetry are At Element and IF, both from Talisman House. He hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics.

(BK-9781590179000)

SKU BK-9781590179000
Barcode # 9781590179000
Brand The New York Review of Books, Inc
Artist / Author Fondane, Benjamin, Schwartz, Leonard, Leonard Schwartz
Shipping Weight 0.2000kg
Shipping Width 0.110m
Shipping Height 0.020m
Shipping Length 0.180m
Assembled Length 17.800m
Assembled Height 1.500m
Assembled Width 11.400m
Type Paperback

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