Jacqueline Chambord reads René Char's poetry, the basis of Pierre Boulez's celebrated song cycle Le Marteau Sans Maître, on Sospeso's March 5 concert.

René Char, one of the important twentieth-century French poets, was born in 1907 and died in 1988.  A controversial figure, he had as many detractors as admirers.  He was a pivotal personality in the surrealist movement, and later was a strong cultural force in the French Resistance.  "His work," writes Yves Berger, "is the portrait of a man with will, energy, impatience, an almost animalistic force.  Nothing provokes him more than immobility (that is, resignation, or acceptance of the status quo):  thus his language, his images of movement. a movement not supple and flowing, but rapid, strong, violent, even brutal." 

Jackson Matthews, in the introduction to Char'sHypnos Waking, provides this portrait:

"He is an abundant man—in size, in vitality, in speech, in silences, in ideas and affections, in seriousness, gaiety, gentleness, violence.  The sum of all these is a kind of brooding intensity that seems at any moment free to take any turn.  He is exalted and harried by the excessive life in him.  He speaks in the rhythms of Provence where he was born, where he grew up, and where he still lives in part.  He studied at the lycee in Avignon and at the University in Aix.  He was one of the early surrealists.

"But it was the war and his experience as the leader of a Maquis group in Provence that have most deeply affected his work—channeled his major themes, furnished the substance and many of the subjects of his later poems.  The privation, the hunger, the moral suffering of those years were somehow turned into the passionate economy of his style, his rage to compress everything into aphorisms and short bursts of prose.

"Char restores to the poet his mission in our distraught world. This is the major burden of his work.  He has faced the difficult conditions of human freedom, and understood the role of the imagination in the life of man.  He defends poetry with the passion of Shelly but with more human warmth and wisdom.  It is in his humanity, his love, that Char stands above most of his contemporaries.  But this love is fatally crossed.  For the poet is the visionary leader of man, an absolute figure alone on the frontiers of the possible, 'there where the sky just went down.'  His task is to bring into being the unhoped-for, the unexpectable.  In the high lucidity of his star-crossed love, in the flash of the poem, Char has learned how to hope and how to praise."

Joshua Cody, with text from The Library.