Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the publishers who granted permission for me to reproduce and translate extracts from André du Bouchetâs works: Le Bruit du temps, Fata Morgana, Ãditions Unes, and Mercure de France, as well as to Sun&Moon and Yale for permission to reproduce published translations into English of his writing by David Mus and by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers respectively. Suhrkamp and Gallimard have generously allowed me to reproduce in full Paul Celanâs âSchneebettâ and Jean-Pierre Lefebvreâs translation of the poem into French. Philippe Blanc at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet helped with access to Du Bouchetâs notebooks and letters and I am grateful to Anne de Staël and Bertrand Badiou for allowing me to read and cite them. Francis Helgorsky kindly permitted me to reproduce two of his photographs from Andains, by Du Bouchet, and provided the images. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked I shall be pleased to make the necessary arrangements. Thank you to Christa Stevens at Brill for her guidance and to Michael Brophy for his careful reading of the manuscript. Any errors which remain are my own.
Jean Khalfa introduced me to the work of André du Bouchet a long time ago and has been a source of inspiration throughout my time studying poetry. I have presented aspects of the research in this book at seminars and conferences in Dublin, Durham, Kent, Leicester, and Oxford, and am grateful for constructive discussions with participants at those events. Colleagues in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham have listened to papers or read drafts of chapters, as well as giving me the opportunity to learn from their own research. I have benefited from research leave at Birmingham to complete this project and assistance to visit libraries. I should like to acknowledge the advice and support offered by Helen Abbott, Caroline Ardrey, Hugues Azérad, Jeff Barda, Michael Bishop, Hilary Brown, Martyn Cornick, Lisa Downing, Elliot ÂEvans, Stephen Forcer, Charles Forsdick, Andrew Ginger, Jennifer Gosetti-ÂFerencei, Nigel Harris, Susan Harrow, Edward Hughes, Sara Jones, Michael G. Kelly, Emily McLaughlin, Sofia Malamatidou, Nina Parish, Gabriela Saldanha, Shane Weller, James Wishart, and the late Angela Kershaw and Michael Sheringham, who are greatly missed.
My most patient readers continue to be Peter and Rosemary Wagstaff. Thank you also to Edmund Newey for discussions of poetry and for support every day. Our children, Eleanor and James Newey, have taught me a lot about the importance of time and varieties of attentiveness, and they have put up with the occasions when my own attention has been elsewhere: this book is dedicated to them.