ABSTRACT
Like Samuel Beckett, Cioran, Gherasim Luca, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, and Edmond Jabes, Silvia Baron Supervielle is a foreign-born author who adopted French as her literary language. She is also one of the most original writers to focus on that key twentieth-century question: exile. As Baron Supervielle specifies in La Frontiere, a long meditation first involving a woman who observes a boy dancing on a beach, "it is not necessary to make a voyage to be a voyage, nor to make movements to be movement". Baron Supervielle's poetry and prose, which are devoid of rhetorical flourishes and literary tricks, endeavor to show that this ecstatic concord can be achieved, if only momentarily. Baron Supervielle's elliptic poetry and richly textured prose have explored the ambiguous boundaries between past and present, the enigmas of personal identity, the mysteries of perception, and the oracular nature of poetic language.
