Andre du Bouchet et ses Autres (review)

In a poem from the early 1950 s, Paul Celan advises the reader to "Speak— / But keep yes and no unsplit. / And give your say this meaning: / give it the shade" ("Sprich auch du," Paul Celan: Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger, 1980). Celan, probably the twentieth century's greatest poet of otherness, suggests that we speak, see, and think in a way that will continually keep our perceptions, feelings, and thoughts open to all imaginable and unimaginable possibilities, even those that are opposite to what our words say. Every affirmation needs to be enveloped in its negation, every "yes" surrounded by the halo of a "no," and vice versa. Above all else, human activity must remain conscious of the shade of otherness—that shadow of non-meaning, negativity, and death—which falls across the landscape of the world. Otherness is for Celan the fundamental reality of existence, and poetry is its chosen medium of expression. The poem is dialogue, the movement of language toward "the mystery of an encounter," and this encounter is a meeting with what is "wholly Other" (see Celan's Bremen Prize and Büchner Prize speeches from 1958 and 1960 , respectively, in his Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner, 2001).

It is not surprising, then, that this great German poet of dialogical and dialectical alterity who emigrated to Paris in 1948 would befriend the group of young postwar, post-surrealist writers (Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Gaëtan Picon, Michel Leiris, Louis-René des Forêts, and André du Bouchet), known as the Ephémère poets after the review they started in 1966 , and would influence the evolution of their poetics in different ways and to differing degrees. Perhaps the Ephémère poet the most taken with Celan—not only did he write about and translate the German poet but he crafted the syntax, structure, and typography of his own poetry in a way that would "keep yes and no unsplit"—was du Bouchet. Celan's view of poetry as allotropic, as pointing in the direction of and moving out toward the Other, had definite appeal for du Bouchet. And it is the centrality of this otherness—the alterity of poetry as well as the alterity of the unwritten and unsaid, that otherness which silence and white space represent—in du Bouchet's work that testifies to the merit of the book of essays, most of which are informative and of very high quality, that Philippe Met has collected under the title André du Bouchet et ses Autres. For otherness of all kinds—that between words and the whiteness of the page, that between speech and silence, that between a German or English text (a Hölderlin poem, a Shakespeare play) and du Bouchet's French translation, that between the poet's "I" and the "you" he addresses, that between the poetic voice and the other selves latent and mute within it, and that between a writing and all the other manifold possibilities and variations of language which the presence of the words on the page annuls—is developed in compelling ways by the ten contributors to this volume who offer meticulous, often original, readings of du Bouchet's poems, essays, translations, and notebooks.

Du Bouchet, who died in 2001 , and whom Met calls "one of the greatest poetic voices of our time," posed for himself and for his readers an irresolvable question: how can a poet represent what is fundamentally other, especially when the mere act of figuration disfigures the otherness he or she wishes to represent? Or more precisely, how can language capture that which is other than and different from language? Du Bouchet had a number of contemporary avatars, older than he—Alberto Giacometti in painting and sculpture and Celan in poetry—to show him the way. And many essays in André du Bouchet et ses Autres study the influence of these exemplary models. Yasmine Getz, Valéry Hugotte, Michel Collot, and Michael Bishop devote part of their articles to du Bouchet...