Cinepoems and Others
  • Published: 15 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590179000
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

Cinepoems and Others

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French-Romanian surrealist poet and intellectual Benjamin Fondane defied definition, spurred borders geographical and generic, cavorted with Antonin Artaud, Man Ray, and Chagall, and wrote some of the most beautiful verse of his generation. This is the first book-length collection of poems by Fondane ever to appear in English and spans his remarkable career, from early to later works.

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.

This bilingual edition includes the original French versions of each poem.
  • Published: 15 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590179000
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

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Praise for Cinepoems and Others

"Fondane ... deserves to be celebrated outside France ... as his far-ranging gifts and accomplishments are at the heart of 20th-century Jewish artistic and philosophical modernism."--Benjamin Ivry, The Jewish Daily Forward

"Fondane's polemical approach confronts the reader with some explosive turns of thought which may lead us to reconsider everything we took for granted about life and art."--Andrew Rubens, Glasgow Review of Books

"I am proud to have known Fondane, learnt the elements of philosophy from particularly Chestov's and his own, special kind of existential philosophy, and to have been, at a crucial moment in my youth, greatly influenced by him." --David Gascoyne

"I was seized by the force of his images anchored in carnality, and I had the feeling of listening to a voice that was both unique and powerful, the voice of a man who, unworried by literary effect, shouted out his human condition." --Michel Carassou