Koncert samoty

Maurice Blanchard (1890-1960) is now considered one of the most important and original French poets of the last century. During his lifetime he was almost unknown, appreciated only by a few close friends and a few dozen readers. He did not seek fame or literary prizes; he chose, quite willingly and deliberately, a place on the very fringes of a literary world that was alien, hostile, rotten.

His path to poetry was as unintelligible and unusual as his texts. The fateful moment when the ageing aeronautical engineer and hydroplane designer is born a poet is the encounter with a poem by Paul Éluard in front of José Corti's bookshop. A space open to surrealism, where imagination is allowed everything, is for Blanchard a place he will guard fiercely until his last days. Although inspired by his method, he never became a member of a surrealist group and thus retained the freedom and liberty to create texts solely according to his inner purpose.

His poetry has a certain self-therapeutic dimension to it, which is combined in its insistent expression with revolt as an inner necessity, whose possible external appeal is a thing of no value, even undesirability.
This is the first translation into English of a selection of the poems. It contains poems from the years 1934-1955, thus covering, with the exception of the first collection published under a pseudonym, the poet's entire creative period.

Czech edition