Poetry
Cendres
Not translated into English
Jean Amrouche · 1934
Synopsis
Early poems in which the Kabyle village left in childhood keeps returning, along with a mother who speaks a language these verses do not use, and the tombs of the ancestors which the one who sings them announces in advance will not shelter him. A figure of an absent person runs through the book without ever being given a name.
Context
The pieces date from 1928 to 1934 and appeared first in a Tunis review, Mirages, run by Armand Guibert. The two men had met in Sousse in the spring of 1930, just after the military service of one of them, and wrote to each other up to five times a week. Guibert turned his review into a publishing house in 1933, at first for his own verse, and immediately welcomed this sixty-eight-page booklet. A stay in the native village, during these years, provided the piece that the author dedicated to his friend under the title Adieu au pays natal. L'Harmattan reissued the text in 1983, introduced by Amar Hamdani, and Mayence published a German version in 1990.
Who it is for
Sixty-eight pages of verse, in French. One should know that the man who wrote them could weep, he said, only in Berber, and that he left only two slim books of poetry.
Prizes and reception
The book remained nearly half a century without a reissue: it was not until 1983 that a Paris publishing house put it back into circulation.