Cinepoems & Others

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.