To That Which Ends Not: Threnody

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This stunningly singular–indeed all but unclassifiable–work is neither simply an elegy for the poet and philosopher Michel Deguy’s wife of forty years nor simply a work of mourning. There is almost nothing here, in Deguy’s sharp poetic prose and philosophical ruminations, of emotion recounted in tranquility. Rather, these often astonishing pages etch the jagged edges of anguish experienced in the immediate aftermath of the profoundly affecting death of one’s beloved. In these fragments written from deep within the solitude of mourning, the entire horizon of life and love shudders and falls prey to the erosion of meaning caused by the interruption of death. Here memories and intimate details from forty years of shared life lend urgency to philosophical exegesis and analysis, carried out in dialogue with his own work and with the tradition. Memories send him rummaging through his books, excavating his oeuvre for traces of a presence now marked by absence. And his attentiveness to life and language sends him into the traditions of poetry and thought that have informed his work for decades, from Homer and Heraclitus to Heidegger, Baudelaire, Blanchot, Derrida, and Nancy. Robert Harvey’s accurate and astute translation and notes are always attentive to Deguy’s allusiveness and linguistic invention.

Stuart Kendall