French Literature Reviews - 2026
Benjamin Fondane, Le mal des fantômes
Poetry and Poetics
Benjamin Fondane, Le mal des fantômes, new edition. Prepared by Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou, with the collaboration of Monique Jutrin
Foreword by Henri Meschonnic, 288 pages, €9.50
ISBN: 978-2-86432-485-0
Abstract
"Of all his contemporary poets, not a single one—not even those who participated in the Resistance—not a single one has written of rebellion and the zest for life fused with a sense of mortality quite like Benjamin Fondane. His status as a phantom himself undoubtedly has something to do with it: an émigré from life hunted along the rivers of Babylon.
Opposing philosophical dualisms, he exists in the continuity of life rooted in the poem, and the poem rooted in life. Through this, he remains present."
Henri Meschonnic
This volume brings together under the title *Le Mal des fantômes* the five books of poetry written in French, in accordance with the wish expressed by Fondane in a letter he managed to send to his wife from the Drancy camp, where he was interned from March 14 to May 30, 1944.
Text Excerpt
Titanic
It is a terrifying dream and I am still within it.
– Something shifting that we call Earth
is sinking headlong, slowly, beyond the gaze of being…
To port, the laundry dries as before the deluge,
calmly the chess game continues, a pawn moves forward,
the dance in the hall penetrates the flesh
with the sweet scent of the tropics…
On the deck descending slowly beyond the gaze of being
the light stands upright, afraid to fall,
the men stand upright, afraid to lie down,
a congress of upright phantoms,
they cry out: "Who will buy me?
So much for my freedom, so much for my conscience,
so much for my body, it is not dear,
price cut on justice,
forty sous for holiness
white sale, God is on clearance,
everything must go for cash!"
And among them, through them, within them,
secret, repulsive,
something invisible, tenacious, obscene, slow,
provokes new relations,
bursts like a patiently ripened pustule,
brings forth the earthy sun of sleeplessness,
rises in the throat like vomit,
turns the rose of cancers blue
beneath the lace of bodices,
and suddenly a furious wind of destruction blows
immovable – thaws in the poles, dementias,
long simmering, treacherous aggressions,
incubated in the headquarters of the spirit,
and the waltz of malaise tangles panting flesh,
shakes the dancers' glass tray,
operates the exchanges, the satisfactions,
the primordial wounds,
the awakening of damp substances to pleasure,
the delectable anguish
of wasting eternity
for one long, full minute of nothingness.
Five minutes before the end of the world
the orchestra strikes up the Thunder…
Beauty dies of exhaustion
on the laps of spectators
moved by this Night, the most savory of all…
[…]
Press Excerpts
Libération, Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 November 2006
by Éric Loret
In 1933, Fondane wrote an article for Romanian students: "Tomorrow, in the concentration camps, it will be too late." One imagines there were, as with every ideological catastrophe, fine political analysts to retort that one shouldn't dramatize. He died at Auschwitz in 1944, sent there on the penultimate transport from Drancy, having been brought there by French cops. Benjamin Wechsler was Jewish and Moldovan; he signed as Fundoianu in Romanian, Fondane in French. He frequented Shestov, read Heidegger, made pure cinema films around 1929 (*Rapt* with Kirsanov), and wrote aesthetic essays. One is reminded of a surrealized Rimbaud upon discovering his French-language poems (all gathered here), a certain brassy horn-awakened sound: "Cry of the flesh, spirit, old instrument of dream!" It is a phantom speaking to us, as in this address to the reader to come, a narrative of eternal barbarism: "You were not born on the roads / no one threw your little ones into the sewer / like cats still without eyes, / you did not wander from city to city / hunted by the police, / you did not know disasters at dawn, / cattle cars / and the bitter sob of humiliation, / accused of a crime you did not commit, / of a murder whose corpse is still missing, / changing name and face, / so as not to carry a name that has been jeered at / a face that everyone has used / as a spittoon!"
Benjamin Fondane was a writer, philosopher, and filmmaker whose life and work were shaped by the historical upheavals of the twentieth century. The poetry collected in Le Mal des fantômes represents a part of his French-language writings, composed during a period of persecution in Europe. Readers interested in twentieth-century poetry and the literature of witness may find this new edition relevant to their studies.
This volume brings together the five books of poetry written in French, in accordance with the wish expressed by Fondane in a letter sent to his wife from the Drancy camp, where he was interned in 1944. The present edition has been prepared by Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou, with the collaboration of Monique Jutrin and a foreword by Henri Meschonnic, presenting this body of work to readers within the context of modern literature.