René Char

René Char (14 June 1907 – 19 February 1988), born René-Émile Char, was a 20th century French poet, and a member of the French Resistance forces of World War II.

I believe in the magic and authority of words.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Quotes

• I believe in the magic and authority of words.
  • Message as a member of the French resistance, to his superiors in London, insisting that certain codewords "The library is on fire" be changed after a disastrous parachute drop which set a forest on fire and alerted the Gestapo to the location of his group of Maquis fighters, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff

• Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.
  • A statement written soon after the end of World War II, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff

• Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
  • A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
    • As quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132
  • Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
    • As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50

• With my teeth
  I have seized life
  Upon the knife of my youth.
  With my lips today,
  With my lips alone…
  • "Mute Game", as translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson in Guernica : a magazine of art & politics (June 2007)

Quotes about Char

Char embodies the ideal of the poet fighting for the nobility of the world — the leader of a small resistance group dedicated to honoring the ten thousand things of the universe … Illumination was his theme, his method… ~ Susanne Dubroff

For me lightning lasts

René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs.
I believe it also.
With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it. ~ William Carlos Williams

• Char embodies the ideal of the poet fighting for the nobility of the world — the leader of a small resistance group dedicated to honoring the ten thousand things of the universe. Mountains and rivers, flowers and vipers, meteors and rain — everything teems with meaning for this poet. … Illumination was his theme, his method — "For me lightning lasts," Char declared. His work is an essay in revelation.
  • Susanne Dubroff, in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004)

• A tour de force into the ineffable.
  • Martin Heidegger, on Char's poetry, as quoted in Martin Heidegger : Between Good and Evil‎ (1999) by Rüdiger Safranski

• In that poem "keeping vigil" for René Char means writing the poem. The poem is the vigil. Sometimes one wants to hold up a lighted wick before a certain name. In the case of Char it has to do with the fusion of poetry and active resistance to facism, in his life, with no loss to the poetry. Leaves of Hypnos is also a record of an unusual masculinity caught up in war but not deluded by it.
  • Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

• History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grandmaster narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions...In Midnight Salvage there's the poem drawn from René Char's resistance journals
  • Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

• I think
  of the poetry
  of René Char
  and all he must have seen
  and suffered
  that has brought him
  to speak only of
  sedgy rivers,
  of daffodils and tulips
  whose roots they water,
  even to the free-flowing river
  that laves the rootlets
  of those sweet-scented flowers
  that people the
  milky
  way
  • William Carlos Williams, in "To a Dog Injured in the Street" (1954)

• The cries of a dying dog
  are to be blotted out
  as best I can.
  René Char
  you are a poet who believes
  in the power of beauty
  to right all wrongs.
  I believe it also.
  With invention and courage
  we shall surpass
  the pitiful dumb beasts,
  let all men believe it,
  as you have taught me also
  to believe it. 
  • William Carlos Williams, in "To a Dog Injured in the Street" (1954)

External links

• "New Translations of René Char" by Nancy Naomi Carlson in Guernica : a magazine of art & politics (June 2007)
• Translation of Conge au Vent