Sur les pentes inférieures Préface de Jean Paulhan. Note de Francis Dumont

Sur les pentes inférieures gathers Éluard’s first poems written under German occupation, during the winter of 1940–1941, when, as he later recalled in his “Raisons d’écrire” at the end of Au rendez-vous allemand, “because of the cold, we went a month without opening the shutters.” These are the first poems to evoke the occupier — “nothing but darkness in mind” — and solitude, which “prepares for vengeance a bed from which I shall be born,” along with the nascent fraternity of men at war, soon to form “a crowd at last united,” in the closing words of the final poem.

This is the fourth cahier of the review Poètes, edited by Yanette Delétang-Tardif and published by La Peau de chagrin, at 2 rue des Beaux-Arts. It was preceded by three cahiers devoted to Jean Follain (July), Fernand Marc and Pierre Guéguen (September); five further cahiers followed, on Yanette Delétang-Tardif (November), Jacques Audiberti (January 1942), Maurice Betz, Thérèse Aubray (March) and Eugène Guillevic (June).

Sur les pentes inférieures is illustrated at the head with a previously unpublished portrait by Picasso, made specially during a meeting with Éluard on 6 October 1941. The overall print run is unknown; the deluxe issue comprises 36 copies on Japanese paper.

This booklet is the penultimate wartime publication of the Beresniak printing house, founded in 1912 by Abraham Lazare Beresniak, a Jewish émigré from Austro-Hungarian Galicia, whose presses had produced René Char’s Le Visage nuptial in 1938. In December 1941, the manager Léon Beresniak and two of his brothers connected with the firm, Maurice and Wolf — three of the founder’s sons, the founder himself dying in 1943 — were arrested and deported: the two latter on the first convoy to leave France, on 27 March 1942; the former on the thirty-fifth, on 21 September 1942. Subjected to “economic Aryanization” as a “Jewish enterprise,” the printing house was restored after the Liberation to Serge Beresniak, the surviving brother, who ran it until its closure in 1975.

Éluard’s first poems written under the Occupation.