René Char

René Char (1907–1988) was a French poet born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in the Vaucluse. He is one of the most significant French poets of the twentieth century. After a brief engagement with the Surrealist movement in the early 1930s — documented in Le Marteau sans maître (1934), later set to music by Pierre Boulez — he developed a poetry of formal compression and moral intensity that belongs to no movement.

During the Second World War, Char commanded a Resistance maquis in the Provence under the name Captain Alexandre. Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946), written during the Resistance, is a collection of prose fragments functioning simultaneously as a document of the Occupation and as a work of literary art. His principal collections — Fureur et Mystère (1948), Les Matinaux (1950), La Parole en archipel (1962) — are central texts of modern French poetry. He maintained working relationships with Pablo Picasso, with whom he produced artist's books; with Georges Braque, a deep and lasting friendship; and with Alberto Giacometti and Zao Wou-Ki. He corresponded with Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, and his writing was the subject of sustained philosophical attention. His poetry has been translated into many languages and continues to be published internationally.