Benjamin Fondane

"Benjamin Fondane was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerfully lyric poetic style; a near-surrealist who embraced and produced his own version of existential philosophy; a Romanian poet who wrote in French; a self-consciously Jewish poet of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, where he was murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of a plenitude, an overflowing. After Fondane's death, the poetry might have been forgotten had not writers like E.M. Cioran kept the memory of the work alive, and in France today, Fondane's poetry is again widely available. This first American collection of Fondane's poetry includes his surrealist "Cine-poems," philosophical meditations, and poems that, in their secular/mystical Judaism, confront the calamity--and imaginative triumph--of European Jewry. Poems included in this collection are translated by Mitch Abidor, Marianne Bailey, E.M. Cioran, Joseph Donahue, Eric Freedman, Henry King, Andrew Rubens, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, and Leonard Schwartz"--

"Benjamin Fondane--who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz--was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, "a torture and a spur." Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom--the State, History, the Law, the Idea. Existential Monday is the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English. Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century"--