"Strange Friends" Author: [France] Jules Supervielle Publisher: Guangxi People's Publishing House Translator: Wu Yannan

- Editor's Recommendation -

★Dedicated to those who toss and turn sleeplessly in the dark night of the world, dedicated to the life we ​​share and the misfortunes that are difficult to share, dedicated to loneliness and what it creates.

★The representative works of Jules Supervière, one of the most important poets and writers in French and even world literature in the 20th century, are fully translated into Chinese for the first time.

★His works were highly praised by famous poets such as Rilke, Gide, Valéry, Larbeau, Michaux, Etienne, Blanchot, Cocteau, and Jacobet, and also had a profound influence on Chinese poets such as Dai Wangshu.

★"Innocent Convicts" is "a book about human loneliness, a book about man's great isolation in the face of life, love and death", and also "a book about self-torture and identity rupture", which reveals our inner walls; "Stranger Friends" is "a book of friendly cosmic understanding", "which provides some secret passages from external indifference to friendship and love".

★ "The tone here is more serious, lower, closer to silence; we feel the tension caused by the expectation of solemn events; the poet whispers to show respect for the mystery and ignite a meaning behind the phenomenon, which will return the phenomenon to a more real world. Without rebelling, but at the cost of immobility and infinite vigilance, the innocent convict walked out of his prison, and the prison walls had become thin, transparent and ethereal." (Gabriel Buñuel's review of "The Innocent Convict")

★ "The poet tends to comprehend, rather than perceive, the fascinating dramatic elements constructed in him by the antinomy of participation, and the laws of individual existence from which he cannot escape. He lives like a dismembered person, crying out his suffering. His words create in vain the shadows of all things and stars, which rashly lead a kind of existence into the withdrawal of its existence, as well as those strange friends who ignore him. He only grasps some illusions, while he thinks he controls the universe." (Roland de Renéville's comment on "Strange Friends")

- Introduction -

This book includes two poetry collections of Supervière: "Innocent Convicts" and "Stranger Friends".

"Innocent Convicts" is a collection of poems edited and expanded by the poet based on his two previous short poetry collections, "Oloron-Sainte-Marie" and "Seized". According to the poet's self-description in the typed manuscript prepared for a radio talk in November 1951, this collection of poems is "a book of human loneliness, a book of man's great isolation in the face of life, love and death", and at the same time, it is also "a book of self-torture, a book of identity rupture". Therefore, this collection of poems marks a shift from the outside to the inside in the poet's creation: "If "Gravity" is the place of poetry without boundaries, the location of interstellar space, then "Innocent Convicts" is the book of inner walls."

Most of the poems included in "Strange Friends" were previously published in "New France Magazine", "Southern Manual" and "Europe", and were published in a collection after deletion and supplementation. On the one hand, this collection of poems can be regarded as a continuation of "Innocent Convicts" in terms of theme, that is, the poet trapped in the "prison of self" began to seek communication with the outside world. On the other hand, the narrative interest it presents echoes the stories created by the poet in the same period. The poet called this collection of poems "a book of friendly cosmic understanding": "The poet's friendship shines brightly and shines into the humblest objects, which does not prevent him from continuing to frequently contact distant distances and stars." The publication notice of the book reads: "...it provides some secret passages from external indifference to friendship and love."

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