Resistance and its Futures: Translating the (Untranslatable) Wartime Poetry of René Char

This two-day international conference will explore how René Char’s Feuillets d’Hypnos  (Leaves of Hypnos), became a global phenomenon across a range of languages and media.  This collection of 237 short prose poems was drafted by Char while leading a division of the French Resistance in WWII. Though often considered untranslatable, the collection’s mysterious, aphoristic language soon inspired translations into more than 30 languages, as well as the visual arts, theater, music and film.

Shedding light on the experience of oppression, war, and suffering, along with hope and an ongoing quest for beauty, Char’s text and its various renditions together constitute a living, global legacy. They also prompt a series of historical and philosophical questions: How might these translations offer new insight into Char’s work and the political and aesthetic contexts of its reception? And what might these inter-lingual and inter-semiotic versions tell us about translation as well as literary and artistic resistance more broadly?

Some thirty scholars and artists—as well as a number of Princeton students—will begin to consider these issues in panels, conversations, and performances, which promise to provide new insight into the work, life and afterlife of René Char.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Humanities Council, the Princeton Center of Excellence / French Embassy in the United States, University Center for Human Values, and the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies.

Organized by Sandra Bermann (Comparative Literature). Contact Michael Franz, Comparative Literature Department Manager, with questions.

Conference Schedule 

April 30: East Pyne 127

 6:00- 7:30
Pre-conference screening : Jérôme Prieur’s film, 1941, dernier bateau pour l’Exil

May 1:  Chancellor Green Rotunda

9.00 – 10.30
The politics of languages

Xita Rubert, ‘Impersonality’
Isabelle Chen, ‘Regional Resonances’
Rachel Galvin, ‘Reading René Char in Spanish’
Fabrice Langrognet, ‘Looking at Space and Time in the Feuillets‘

11.00 – 12.30
Yesterday and today

Brooke Holmes, ‘Char’s Heraclitus’
Jesse Godine, ‘Translation and Originality’
Karen Emmerich, ‘Belated Waking’
André Benhaïm, ‘Ulysses’ Brothers:  Char, Camus, and the Odyssey’

1.30 – 3.00
Poetry as resistance

(Poetry reading by Gabriel Dufay)
Effie Rentzou ‘Translating Resistance to Poetry’
Peter Makhlouf, ‘Mouvance: a Politico-philosophical Inquiry’
Yoshimoto Motoko, ‘Les traductions japonaises: les attraits d’une l’oeuvre qui se révolte contre l’obscurité du temps et la difficulté de la traduction’

3.30 – 5.00
From the literary to the digital

Brian Kernighan, ‘ Exploratory data analysis of translations of Feuillets d’Hypnos‘
Wouter Haverals, ‘When Humans and Machines Translate Char: Computational Insights into Feuillets d’Hypnos Across Languages’
Christiane Fellbaum, Arnov Ambre, and Jalen Johnson, ‘From Lyrical to Digital and Back’ 

5:30-6:30
New Char translations by students from HUM 423

May 2: Chancellor Green Rotunda

9.00 – 10.30
Dialogues with tradition

Daniel Heller-Roazen, ‘Before the Unknown’
Haun Saussy, ‘Signals Both Discreet and Discrete’
Robyn Creswell, ‘Loyaux Adversaires’

11.00 – 12-30
Translating change

David Bellos, ‘Poetry and Translation’
Liesl Yamaguchi, ‘Moonlight’
Tamara Hundorova, ‘The Language of War’

1.30 – 3.00
Resistance and the arts 

(Poetry reading by Gabriel Dufay)
Marie-Claude Char, ‘René Char, Poet and Artist’
Gabriel Sobin, ‘Translating Poetry into Stone’
Sasha Hemon, ‘All Together: Music, Poetry and Vision’
Polina Kosmadaki, ‘Zervos, Char, and Cahiers d’Art’

3.30- 5.00
Resistance now

Annette Becker, ‘Traduire les paysages’
Emily Apter and Jacques Lezra, ‘Paleo-resistances’
Matthew Reynolds, ‘Collaborating with an LLM’
Philip Nord, ‘The Fate of Resistance Humanism’

5:30- 7:00
Reading from the Feuillets by Gabriel Dufay
Screening of Jérôme Prieur’s film, René Char, nom de guerre Alexandre