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.
"Un genio poético sin par dentro del surrealismo. Arrancado de la historia violentamente: devorado por el aparato monstruoso y genocida del nacional socialismo Alemán. Relativamente desconocido en Latinoamérica sobre todo fuera de Argentina. Una pros ecléctica, que sin duda ubiésese consolidado en una potente expresión lírica de un plasticismo audiovisual único. ¿Y encima cercano a Shestov en vida? 5/5. ¡Toca leerlo! "