Students delved into Char’s papers that are housed at Princeton University Library, translated his WWII poetry, and traced his wartime steps on the ground in France.
Dawn Breakers / Les Matinaux: 2 (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets) by Char, Rene at AbeBooks.co.uk - ISBN 10: 1852241330 - ISBN 13: 9781852241339 - Bloodaxe Books - 1992 - Softcover
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In 1957, when Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm, a reporter asked him which writers he felt the closest to. He gave two names: his close friend Rene Char and the philosophical mystic Simone Weil. By that point, Weil had been dead for over a decade, but Camus, according to Robert Zaretsky in
The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, didn’t consider her physical absence a “barrier between friends.” Camus edited the manuscripts Weil left behind after her 1943 death from tuberculosis during his short stint as an editor at the prestigious Gallimard publishing house. “The encounter,” writes Zaretsky, “left an enduring mark on Camus’s thought and writing. He grew close to Weil’s parents, remaining in touch with them even after he stepped down as an editor.”