FREE VERSE EDITIONS, Edited by JON THOMPSON In English and French. The sixteenth of the twenty-five major works of Guillevic published by Gallimard since 1942, SUMMONED (REQUIS) represents a pivotal moment, reaffirming the poet’s position as an essential voice in contemporary French po-etry. Noted for its ceaseless probing of the ungraspable enigma experienced in every immediate encounter with the material world, be it with stone, sea, a leaf, a blade of grass, the poet’s vision now opens onto the ultimate reaches of the universe. The poet is summoned to bear witness to the human mortal condition and at the same time heed the compulsion of our touch/ Upon the limitless.
To translate the movements of one existent into another is poetry’s privilege. It is also what life does. The living exchanges that take place between existents as dissimilar as a leaf and a cloud, or a pebble’s surface and a human hand, are what Guillevic’s poem celebrates and exemplifies. This sensitive translation by Monique Chefdor and Stella Harvey gives English-speaking readers the chance to listen to a Breton poet’s unique engagement with spheres of living that extend even to the interstellar. -STEVEN WINSPUR A poem and its translation have been compared to a brocade and its underside: the threads are all there, but the magic is lost. This certainly does not apply to the translation of Guillevic’s REQUIS by Monique Chefdor and Stella Harvey. SUMMONED is its own rich brocade, all the more striking given the daunting task of capturing the elegant simplicity of the form and the ineffable reaches of the content. For, embedded in the multi-layered poetry are both the yearnings of mystics to experience ultimate reality and the endeavors of physicists to explore the unknown realms beyond three-dimensional human existence. -KATHERINE KREUTER EUGENE GUILLEVIC (1907-1997) was one of France’s leading poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Guillevic, as he preferred to be known, published more than thirty-five collections of poetry in his lifetime. MONIQUE CHEFDOR, formerly professor of French and Comparative Literature at Scripps College, Claremont University Center, California, and Maitre de Conferences in Comparative Literature at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, France, has published extensively on 20th century French literature, notably on Cendrars, Proust, Segalen, Guillevic and the relationship between painters and writers. STELLA HARVEY is the author of a monograph Myth and the Sacred in the Poetry of Guillevic (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997) and has published a number of articles on Guillevic, the most recent of which appear in Guillevic maintenant (Paris: Honore Champion, 2011) and Notes Guillevic Notes (Vol. I, Fall/Automne, 2011). She has also published in the field of applied linguistics. She is a lecturer in the Centre for English Language and Academic Writing at Goldsmiths University of London. LUCIE ALBERTINI GUILLEVIC, the poet’s widow, is a writer and translator. Her collaborations as a translator have introduced to major French publishers (Maurice Nadeau, Gallimard, Actes Sud, Arfuyen) some forty Swedish and Finnish writers.