Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé
One of only 120 copies on vergé de Hollande, signed by the author and the artist, this copy no. 29.
Inscribed and signed: “à Paul Fustier, en sympathique hommage, R. Char, avril 1961.”
This was the second collaboration between the poet and the painter, following the publication of Poèmes in 1951. Nicolas de Staël and René Char, two “substantial allies,” met in 1950 at the instigation of Claude Duthuit. Their correspondence, exchanged between 1951 and 1954, reveals how immediately their friendship became unreserved, total, exhausting and short-lived.
René Char devoted two poems to his friend and his work, published in the second part of Recherche de la base au sommet. De Staël, for his part, portrayed the poet only once: the color lithograph reproduced here as the frontispiece of Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé.
The introduction is by Jean Hugues, the book’s publisher, who explains that it contains the unpublished notes Char wrote while rereading Le Poème pulvérisé, published in 1947: he hoped their publication “would help in understanding René Char’s work,” noting that “the supplementary lines that follow were only intended to reintroduce, after the fact, into the ever-quivering structure of the poem something of the awkward or untenable world that had gone into its making.”