Born Nov. 14, 1898 (d. 1944 in Auschwitz) - Benjamin Fondane (born Wechsler, known in Romania also as Barbu Fundoianu), Jewish-Romanian poet and philosopher.
After his debut in Romanian in 1912, Fondane moved to france in the 1920s where he was part of the Dada circle in Paris with fellow Romanian ex-pat Tzara, the Surrealists and a broader circle of avantgarde artists, including Brancusi. Fondane worked simultaneously on poetry, philosophical and critical essays and experimental film…
Hertsa - Landscapes
It smells of rain this townlet, of autumn, and of hay.
Into the lungs winds carry hot sand from far away.
The young girls are waiting on the untidy street
for the return of silence each evening when they meet
and for the deaf and clumsy mailman wearing a hood.
Chased by the rain, the horse carts have gone now home for good
and in all things the lengthy, wet silence becomes mouldy.
At home, the common people speak Yiddish, seldom loudly.
In yellow shoes, geese slowly step behind a wood fence.
One hears the rain that’s turning now off the gas street lamps
and ageing the leaves into brass bells. Now one can hear
the long and ashy silence, the sound of autumn here,
and the Dorokhoy coach’s well known and damped out rattle.
All’s empty: from the valley return the herds of cattle
that moo, their heads turned backwards, as sucking the cloud rows.
red eyed and scarred the townlet all of a sudden lows.
Translated from Romanian by Dan SolomonPhoto: Benjamin Fondane at Val-de-Grâce, Paris, winter 1940-1941.
Coll. Michel Carassou, Paris.
