# René Char

René Char (14 June 1907 – 19 February 1988), born René-Émile Char, was a 20th century French poet, and a member of the French Resistance forces of World War II.

## Quotes

* I believe in the magic and authority of words.
** Message as a member of the French resistance, to his superiors in London, insisting that certain codewords "The library is on fire" be changed after a disastrous parachute drop which set a forest on fire and alerted the Gestapo to the location of his group of Maquis fighters, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff
* Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.
** A statement written soon after the end of World War II, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff
* Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
** A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
*** As quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132
** Variant translation: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about dreams.
*** As quoted in Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (2000) by Roland Bleiker, p. 50
* With my teeth I have seized life Upon the knife of my youth. With my lips today, With my lips alone…
** "Mute Game", as translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson in Guernica : a magazine of art & politics (June 2007)

## Quotes about Char

* Char embodies the ideal of the poet fighting for the nobility of the world — the leader of a small resistance group dedicated to honoring the ten thousand things of the universe. Mountains and rivers, flowers and vipers, meteors and rain — everything teems with meaning for this poet. … Illumination was his theme, his method — "For me lightning lasts," Char declared. His work is an essay in revelation.
** Susanne Dubroff, in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004)
* A tour de force into the ineffable.
** Martin Heidegger, on Char's poetry, as quoted in Martin Heidegger : Between Good and Evil‎ (1999) by Rüdiger Safranski
* In that poem "keeping vigil" for René Char means writing the poem. The poem is the vigil. Sometimes one wants to hold up a lighted wick before a certain name. In the case of Char it has to do with the fusion of poetry and active resistance to facism, in his life, with no loss to the poetry. Leaves of Hypnos is also a record of an unusual masculinity caught up in war but not deluded by it.
** Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)
* History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grandmaster narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions...In Midnight Salvage there's the poem drawn from René Char's resistance journals
** Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)
* I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way
** William Carlos Williams, in "To a Dog Injured in the Street" (1954)
* The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it.
** William Carlos Williams, in "To a Dog Injured in the Street" (1954)

## External links

* "New Translations of René Char" by Nancy Naomi Carlson in Guernica : a magazine of art & politics (June 2007)
* Translation of Conge au Vent