ABSTRACT
The poet, Claude Esteban—also known for his art criticism and translations of Spanish-language literature—therein devotes terse, haunting verses to an unexpected theme for a Frenchman: King Lear's sorrow and destitution. Elegie de la mort violente consists of prose poems, several epigrammatic "painted images", then the long title-poem. The book is introduced by a quotation from King Lear: "I know when one is dead, and when one lives. She's dead as earth". This is the kind of terrible knowledge that Esteban must acquire, with which he must survive. Esteban explains that human beings "have access to the world only in certain moments, when a force unknown to us denounces the obscure citadel governed by our dreaming and reasoning". "It's no use seeking out such instants", he counsels. Le Nom et la demeure states this challenging dichotomy: "I see living / all that dies. // disappear / with what endures".
