The poet René Char explains his conception of inspiration in a short unpublished correspondence published by a new magazine, Magma, which claims to be a “place of dialogue between artists and writers”. This review (bilingual French-English), the number 1 of which comes out in 2,000 copies on Thursday, is inspired by “the tradition of the great art reviews of the 20th century”. “We tried, with the rights holders, to obtain unpublished or very little seen works, and to give the reader original dialogues”, explained to AFP its creator, Paul Olivennes.
Thus the magazine delivers the correspondence between the author of Feuillets d’Hypnos and his goddaughter, Angélique Berès, the mother of Paul Olivennes. She was 22 when she asked the poet in 1982: “How do words come to you?” The magazine gives, among other things, a facsimile of the envelope and the letter with which René Char replies. “As tears come to the eyes then are born and rush, words do the same,” he begins. This writer has many declared admirers, including President Emmanuel Macron or the Nobel Prize for Literature Peter Handke.
The magazine Magma, in a very large format with a hard cover covered with canvas and priced at 60 euros, must, according to its founder, “offer readers works at the price of an exhibition catalogue”. This number 1 also contains photographs by Agnès Varda and Sophie Calle, or a commentary by Erri De Luca on photos by another Italian in Paris in the 1970s, Luigi Ghirri.
