Benjamin Fondane’s Ulysses

From 1923, when he emigrated from Bucharest, to his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Fondane made a unique and independent-minded contribution to the literary and intellectual life of Paris. One of the most significant pieces in Fondane’s body of work is the long poem Ulysses, first published in 1933. Fondane considerably revised his text during the dark years of occupied Paris, and it is this second
edition without an end,
left unfinished at the time of his deportation, that is translated here for the first time into English. It is a moving testament to the poetic voice and philosophical engagement of this exceptional figure of the Paris avant-garde.