Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char

$16.95

by René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson

“René Char is the conscience of modern French poetry and also its calm of mind. Nancy Naomi Carlson, in these splendid translations, casts new light upon the sublime consequence of Char’s poetic character, and in Stone Lyre the case for sublimity is purely made.” —Donald Revell, poet and translator of Rimbaud and Apollinaire

by René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson

“René Char is the conscience of modern French poetry and also its calm of mind. Nancy Naomi Carlson, in these splendid translations, casts new light upon the sublime consequence of Char’s poetic character, and in Stone Lyre the case for sublimity is purely made.” —Donald Revell, poet and translator of Rimbaud and Apollinaire

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About the Author

René Char (1907-1988) is among the most crucial of twentieth-century writers. An early Surrealist and close friend of the visual artists Braque, Giacometti, and Picasso, during World War Two he was a leader in the underground French Resistance and later an ardent opponent of nuclear technology. His poetry confronts the moral, political, and artistic challenges of modernity with a prophetic eloquence comparable to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.

About the Translator

Nancy Naomi Carlson has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland Arts Council, and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She is author of three poetry collections and translator of Stone Lyre: Poems of René Char (Tupelo, 2010) and of Djiboutian poet Abdourahman A. Waberi’s The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Seagull, 2015). Her own poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, and she holds a PhD in foreign language methodology. She teaches at the Bethesda Writer’s Center.

Advanced Praise

“Early Surrealist, resistance fighter, anti-nuclear activist, and exquisite poet, René Char is at the heart of 20th century French poetry…. Carlson gives English-language readers a real sense of Char’s depth and breadth. And her masterful translations catch the barely contained drama that gives Char’s work such tension and presence….”—Cole Swensen, poet, translator, and founding editor of La Presse

“René Char, intrepid explorer of the marvelous, witness to the catastrophe of history, plowman of ‘the metered field,’ stands revealed in Nancy Naomi Carlson’s splendid translations as a guiding spirit of our time….”—Christopher Merrill, poet, journalist, and director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program

“(T)his new translation of Char’s work …shows us …the intensity, the dream-like language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames….”—from the Foreword to Stone Lyre, by Ilya Kaminsky, poet and author of Dancing in Odessa

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-78-1