Subsequently, Auster's The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry included nine poems translated by Savory, John Montague, and Levertov. To date, though, only the Levertov volume offers any truly representative sampling, and no critical essays exist in English on Guillevic's work. This is not, after all, terribly surprising. Even in French, Guillevic can be an elusive read. Slight, elliptical, gnomic, the poems vanish when looked at straight on.
Words are for knowing.
And by les mots he means, resolutely, French words. Because their mystery, their magic, is in the language itself, these poems do not easily give up their secrets, or travel well. They are their secrets. They crack open the dull rock of French and find crystal within. In English, all too often, only the dullness, the flatness, remains.