Volume 19, Number 9 · November 30, 1972
Object Lessons
By James Merrill
The Voice of Things
by Francis Ponge, translated by Beth Archer Brombert
Herder and Herder, 190 pp., $5.95
Things
by Francis Ponge, translated and selected by Cid Corman
Grossman, 120 pp., $4.95 (paper)
'Printanier et merveilleux,' René Char called him. Ponge himself can imagine being ranked with Chardin and Rameau. He is seventy-three. The two books under review are selections from his writings, which fill a dozen volumes. While practicing 'pure and simple abstention from themes imposed by ideologies of the time,' Ponge has been embraced by the existentialists in their time, and by the structuralists in theirs. Only human, and French, he too has devoted his requisite pages to the Absurd. Still the bloom does not wear off. This genial life's-work will outlast the ideas by which it is judged.
Review, 2741 words
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