Truinas: April 21, 2001

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‘I have now given shape, though clumsily–so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this–to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.’–Philippe Jaccottet

Philippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after Rene Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard’s Pleiade list while still living and working. Truinas, April 21, 2001 is Jaccottet’s meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, Andre du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet’s funeral – ‘an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet’s house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts–scruples–about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.’ – John Taylor