This article is taken from PN Review 12, Volume 6 Number 4, March - April 1980.
from 'Rimbaud the Hooligan' and other pieces (translated by David Gascoyne)This is not the place for personal reminiscence, but I am proud to have known Fondane, learnt the elements of philosophy from his (particularly Chestov's, and his own, special kind of existential philosophy), and to have been, at a crucial moment of my youth, greatly influenced by him. A poem of mine, "To Benjamin Fondane", I now intend to retitle, when it gets reprinted, "I. M. Benjamin Fondane." The facts of his life are, briefly summed up, as follows:
Benjamin Fondane was born in 1898 in Iasi, Roumania, the second child of a Jewish family of German origin. He had two sisters. In 1914 he published some early poems under the pseudonym of Barbu Fundoianu (after a place-name). In 1921 he published a collection of essays on Proust, Claudel, Mallarmé, Jammes, de Gourmont. In 1923 Fondane left Roumania to settle in Paris. The next year, he met Leon Chestov for the first time. In 1928 he published Three Scenarios: ciné-poems. The following year, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, Fondane visited Argentina, presented a season of avant-garde films, and lectured on Chestov. In 1930 he entered Paramount Studios and became assistant director, then scenario-writer. In 1931 he married Geneviève Tessier, with Chestor and Brancusi as witnesses to the ceremony. Next year, Fondane became a regular contributor to Cahiers du Sud, of which he was soon appointed the Philosophy Correspondent. He published Rimbaud le Voyou in 1933; a long French poem Ulysse, in 1934; and in Switzerland took ...
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