68 - Christian BOBIN (1951–2022)

Christian BOBIN (1951–2022) 7 letters, 2017–2019, to Isabelle SLEMPKÈS; 14 pages, in-4 format, stamped colored envelopes. A lovely exchange of letters with a female author. 1917. [14.II] “It’s hard for me to read a manuscript, especially when I’m focused on a book I’m currently working on. But the voice in your pages—I believe I have heard it: honest, a fighter for life—it is the voice of one who knows that ‘second wind’ may be the secret name of writing, its name of resistance”…. [2.III] It is up to her to find a publisher, who will judge whether the manuscript is publishable; on sublimation: “It is not the forgetting of pain but its soaring away, transforming it into light”… [21.XI] He still cannot answer: “A dream, a manuscript—I don’t know what sometimes holds me back in its silence”; he recommends reading Lydie Dattas’s *Carnet d’une allumeuse*: “It is spring itself”… 2018. [July 13] “When the Gypsies reach the intersection of several country roads, they hang a bouquet of flowers on a fence to show other ‘travelers’ who will come the right path so they won’t get lost”… [August 9] He is familiar with “those hellholes—sometimes without air conditioning—where the elderly are crammed together: two of my books come from there, *L’Homme-joie*, and even more so *La présence pure*”… [26.XI] “I like what you say about poetry. It seems to me that it is closer to us than our own blood, and that is why we will never die”… [3.VI.2019]: “It is sometimes so difficult to live that picking up a pencil that has fallen to the ground becomes an impossible task—a mountain whose very sight is overwhelming. […] I know that writing a single sentence sometimes costs the price of the sun”…