ABSTRACT
Like Samuel Beckett, Cioran, Ghérasim Luca, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, and Edmond Jabès, 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. A relative of the poet Jules Supervielle (who was her grandmother’s half-brother), Baron Supervielle was born in Buenos Aires in 1934 and composed her first poems in Spanish. In 1961, she moved to Paris and, after eight years of “reflection and silence,” as she puts it, began producing sparse, haunting lyrics in French. Five small-press volumes gathered these first efforts, which were followed by two major collections: Lectures du vent (1988) and L’Eau étrangère (1993). Exploring the deepest philosophical origins of exile, the oracular sources of poetic expression, the enigmas of personal identity, and the “oblivion / hidden in the shadows” that “emerges to illuminate / the edge of the path,” her verse complements and elucidates three challenging works of prose: L’Or de l’incertitude (1990), Le Livre du retour (1993) and La Frontière (1995).
