Description
Poetry. Translated from the French by Norma Cole. Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death.
"Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafés where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you."—Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the Postface
"She enunciates the words for desire and for loss of the other words with harrowing intensity...[and] explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."—Michael Palmer
"In Danielle Collobert's NOTEBOOKS the urgency of her writing is accompanied by the weight of hindsight—that we know how it ends—and yet it is not stifled by morbidity. Instead, the intensity and integrity of her struggles rise to the surface. Collobert's questions—of presence in the world, of politics and intimacy—are constantly recovered from the blur of experience. Collobert moves towards and away in a feverish attempt to connect, stay connected—whether in her personal encounters, moments of activism or writing—and though she ultimately chooses death, there is enough life in her writing to carry on: 'the hum of life all around... I open / and I close.'"—E. Tracy Grinnell
"Indelible fragments."—Jeff Jackson
"The text of this book is sourced from several notebooks and loose pages found in the Paris hotel room where Danielle Collobert committed suicide... Spanning over 20 years of her life, the text in form resembles the poetry of It Then, though the content is in most cases less abstract. Fragmented phrases separated by dashes describe her interior life, her extensive travels, her relationships with men (though always rather vaguely), her recurring need for solitude, and above all, her experiences with writing. Throughout there is a haunting, hunted desperation in her words, as in each new place she finds herself, she encounters the same familiar struggles with indifference and anxiety, always with death not far from her mind."—S. D. Stewart
Author Bio
Born in Rostrenen in 1940, Danielle Collobert left Bretagne for Paris at the age of eighteen where she worked in an art gallery and self-published her first poems in a book entitled Chants des guerres (1961). Both of Collobert's parents, and her aunt, who survived deportation to Ravensbrück, were members of the Résistance during World War II. Herself a supporter of Algerian independence, Collobert joined the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Front), precipitating her exile in Italy, during which time she completed work on Meurtre, first published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard with the unwavering support of Raymond Queneau. She worked for Révolution africaine, a short-lived journal created at the end of the Algerian war. Collobert's extensive travels, to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, etc., did not prevent her from becoming a member of the group formed around Jean-Pierre Faye and the journal, Change. Her other works include Dire I et II (1972), a radio play the following year, Polyphonie, aired by France Culture, Il donc (1976) and Survie (1978). Upon her return from a trip to New York, Danielle Collobert took her own life in a hotel in Paris on her thirty-eighth birthday. Her complete works, in two volumes, edited by Françoise Morvan, augmented by several unpublished texts, were published by P.O.L. in 2005. Collobert's works available in English include IN THE ENVIRONS OF A FILM (Litmus Press, 2019), MURDER (Litmus Press, 2013), NOTEBOOKS, 1956-1978 (Litmus Press, 2003) and IT THEN (O Books, 1989).
Author City: Paris FRA
Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, WHERE SHADOWS WILL: SELECTED POEMS 1988-2008 (City Lights Publishers, 2009), and Natural Light. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert's It Then, Collobert's Journals, and Jean Daive's A Woman with Several Lives. She has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry, The Fund for Poetry, the Creative Work Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA