20th century Ukrainian born French Surrealist poet
Alain Bosquet (1919-1998) was born in Odessa in 1919 but spent his childhood in Belgium. He was still a student when the Germans invaded the country in 1940. Later he was in the Belgian and French Armies. In 1942 he came to America and became an American citizen. Bosquet was assistant editor of the first Gaullist paper in America, The Voice of France, and was co-founder of the magazine Hemispheres. He passed away in 1998.
“A poem,” according to Alain Bosquet, “is an exacting friend.” Poet, literary editor of Le Monde, and a central fact of French intellectual life, Bosquet (1919-1998) is himself exacting. He demands a “simple, direct, ambitious poetry” and seeks to invent “new rapports between man and the universe, man and the void, man and himself.” Selected by Bosquet, the poems in No Matter No Fact are translated by Samuel Beckett, Edouard Roditi, and the author himself. Denise Levertov as well as Edouard Roditi contribute revised versions of some of the author’s translations. The poems share a poignancy brewed of wit and culture, beauty and sorrow. “Soon,” Bosquet muses in one poem, “there will be a single word/for poem and reality.” Bosquet’s poems “are perfectly beautiful,” André Breton believed, admiring “their contours and their sensitive approach.”
