Truinas: April 21 2001

I have now given shape though clumsily--so clumsily that in the past I would not have divulged them like this--to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April 2001 and dragged around like a burden for three years the burden of an unsatisfactory draft of an unfulfilled promise. Now published despite everything because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.--Philippe JaccottetPhilippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning Swiss-born French poet who in 2014 became only the third poet (after René Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimards Pléiade list while still living and working. Truinas April 21 2001 is Jaccottets meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet André du Bouchet (1924-2001) provoked by Du Bouchets funeral -- an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin) the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchets house in the south of France and not least the doubts--scruples--about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death. -- John Taylor