ABSTRACT
Louis Calaferte parted company with us in 1994, at the age of sixty-six, and we were left with La Mécanique des femmes (1992) burning in our hands. After two years, we were still not sure how to read it. Then came the numerous posthumously published books, beginning with L’Homme vivant (1994), which challenged us to live vertically, religiously (in the senses that Calaferte had forged for this term), though few (if any) of us had yet dared to take Calaferte’s spiritual views seriously. Four years later arrived Le Sang violet de l’améthyste (1998). It was a stern, mysterious, at times touching, at times searingly beautiful greeting from the beyond, yet it was not immediately clear that its carefully interwoven poems and prose texts actually summed up an entire oeuvre. Have we since grasped what this book, not to mention this entire oeuvre, implies? And beginning just before Calaferte’s death and continuing relentlessly ever afterwards, volume after volume of his poems have been rolling off the Tara-buste printing press. Calaferte’s poetry? A long-submerged continent whose existence only attentive readers of his Carnets had suspected. A vast continent, and still today an unexplored frontier.
