Cinepoems and Others [Paperback]

Benjamin Fondane was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerful lyric poetic voice; a renegade surrealist who was also a highly original existential philosopher; a self-consciously Jewish poet  of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy in 1944 just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of an overflowing plenitude. This bilingual selection is the first volume of Fondane’s poetry to appear in English, and it includes a broad sample of his work, from the coruscating and comic cinepoems of his surrealist years, to philosophical meditations, to poems that in their secular and mystical Judaism confront the historical calamity—and imaginative triumph—of European Jewry.Introduction   2

Three Cine-Poems:

Maturing Eye-Lids  13
Mtasipol  19
Horizontal Bar   26

FromUlysses

VII   31
XXI   33
XXXVII   36

FromTitanic(X)   38

The Sorrows of Ghosts49

FromExodus  70

FromBelshazzar's Feast  94

FromRefusal 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“Of all his contemporaries, not one, not even those who were in the Resistance, wrote in revolt, mingling the flavor of life with death, like Fondane.” —Henri Meschonnic

“Benjamin Fondane, Romanian Jewish immigrant writing in his second language, brought a narrative vigor and a lyrical, global, tragicomic imagination to French poetry that it has rarely seen since.” —Marilyn Hacker  

“Cinepoems and Others...arrives with the force lS