From the Poet to Poetry, From Poetry to Poet

Wherever we turn in Fondane's work, whether we speak of Gaston Bachelard or Lev Shestov, of history or the unhappy conscience, of aesthetics or the cinema, we remember that in all these discussions and commentaries there is the poet and poetry. Prose and verse merge. Every insight found in an essay emerges anew in a poem. There it will take on a new life and form. There it will join a multitude of other poems, of collections, and the part of a poet's legacy. This is the legacy that has concerned us for several years, and has made this work possible. The poetry of Fondane is distinct in the sense of reality. There is no fluff of beautiful words creating beautiful imagery. Man is not driving away from the world. He is a being of despair and bewilderment. He faces the absurdity of death. This despair and anguish came from his Jewishness, from the reality of exile, which he lived not only in Romania, but also in France. The reminders of anti-Semitism were everywhere. Fondane could not escape a destiny which he knew hung over every son and daughter of Israel. It hung over the people. It hung over God. Fondane was the eternal questioner, his voyages were unending, his dissatisfactions profound and disturbing. He knew that powerful confrontation between death and knowledge. The beauty of reason never moved without the shadow of death. Man seemed eager to bear this punishment. The enticements of knowledge had no equal. He also knew that death was beyond reason, was a stumbling block for it. It remained a mystery which every religion sought to encounter and conquer. But no religion conquered death. No God conquered the Serpent. In the midst of these two powers, of death and knowledge, Fondane sought life. But this life remained part of his Jewish destiny. Here knowledge found its greatest challenge: a world indifferent to a people who remained believers in a strange God of Law, whose presence is hidden and whose justice never belonged to creation. Law brought God's word into a world bearing the punishment of death, i.e., a world in which death was unknown, where man became conscious of its reality, where life was easily crushed. Man knew the difference between the knowledge of life and the absurdity of death. We read Fondane's poems gathered in two collections. One is called Ulysse. This collection was edited in 1929 on the return of Fondane from