I don't even know where to start with Alain Bosquet. His tremendous literary output as a poet, novelist, translator, journalist, literary critic, editor, professor, essayist, publisher, magazine founder, multi-award-winner, central figure of mid-century Parisian intellectual circles, and goodness knows what else, is almost too expansive to consider in one sitting. He wrote over 40 books, including 20 volumes of poetry. The man did everything. He lived in Brussels, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, England, Germany, before permanently landing in Paris. While enlisted in the US army, he lived in Texas, California, and Maryland. His life story is, similarly, so narratively rich and extraordinary that summarizing it even briefly feels totally overwhelming. I'm just going to have to make do with the following: Alain Bosquet (né Anatole Bisk) was born in Odessa in 1919; he married Norma Caplan in 1954; he died in Paris in 1998.
But maybe let me turn to his words instead. Maybe that’s where I should have started in the first place. Maybe they will help me say something expansive about him, without really saying much at all. Without using that many words, I mean. And that’s fitting, because isn't that what a poem does? Or can do? Certainly his did. I like these few particular lines of his most of all. Let me see if they can say everything I want to say about Bosque, without saying much at all:
Soon, there will be a single word
for poem and reality
Yep. Those lines say everything about him that I wanted to say. By which I mean this: the reality of his expansive life merged, ultimately, with the reality of his expansive art.
-Eugenie Dalland