The brittle age by René Char and translated by Gustaf Sobin

This is poetry from France.

The brittle age by René Char translated by Gustaf Sobin is published by Counterpath Press. This is a Book originally written in French. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78193399611E12.

The Brittle Age, by René Char and translated by Gustaf Sobin, is Char in a title that feels perfectly tuned to his moral and elemental severity. Brittle suggests fragility, but also hardness: something that resists bending until it breaks. Char’s French poetry, shaped by Surrealism, resistance, and a lifelong commitment to compressed intensity, often feels like thought struck from stone. Sobin’s translation gives English readers access to that flint-like lyric force. I would read this book not for narrative comfort, but for pressure, sparks, and the austere beauty of language that refuses waste. Char is a poet of the fragment as conscience. The age is brittle because the world is, and because the poem knows it.

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.