Conocimiento de la tarde

Joë Bousquet has remained in French literature as one of the most brilliant figures of avant-garde creation. We are facing an unclassifiable writer, something to which his unfortunate vital vicissitudes contribute: a decorated soldier in the Great War, a bullet pierces three lumbar vertebrae; Bousquet is left hemiplegic and spends the rest of his days in the bedroom of the family home in Carcassonne. His work occupies a place tangential to surrealism, from whose dream games he departs to follow an ascetic and metaphysical path. For the poet, the power of writing is that of an act that gives birth to both word and life. Only then does his invalidity make sense: 'My wound existed before me; I was born to reincarnate her.' Knowledge of the afternoon is considered the only book of verse published in Bousquet's lifetime, although he rejected the idea of ??separation between poetry and prose; everything written during three decades of intense creativity is animated by the poetic impulse. The book was published in 1945 in a luxury print run, but became widely known when it was reissued by Gallimard in 1947. This is the text that we now offer in the translation of the Canarian writer Ángel Sánchez Rivero, whose first approaches to the poetry of Bousquet date from the 1970s.