Inventors by René Char and translated by Mark Hutchinson

This is poetry from France.

Inventors by René Char translated by Mark Hutchinson is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2015.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780857423245E12.

Inventors, by René Char and translated by Mark Hutchinson, gives Char’s compressed lyric intelligence a title that honors making without making it comfortable. An inventor does not merely decorate the world; an inventor changes the terms by which the world can be encountered. Char’s poems often feel like devices of conscience, small charged mechanisms built from image, resistance, and elemental force. Hutchinson’s translation brings that intensity into English with attention to the hardness and luminosity of Char’s line. I would read Inventors as a book about imaginative necessity: what must be made when inherited language is no longer adequate? Char’s answer is rarely expansive. He invents by compression, by spark, by the fragment that refuses to die.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.