Charles Dantzig

Charles Dantzig is a French author, born in Tarbes (France) on October 7, 1961.

Charles Dantzig was born into a family of professors of medicine. He was of Alsatian German descent. He obtained the baccalauréat at the age of seventeen, and then decided to study Law. Having completed a doctorate in Law from the university of Toulouse, he moved to Paris.

A few years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he published an essay on Remy de Gourmont entitled Remy de Gourmont, Cher Vieux Daim ! (Le Rocher, 1990), soon followed by his first collection of poems, Le chauffeur est toujours seul'', to critical acclaim.

Charles Dantzig joined the publishing company Les Belles Lettres, launching three new collections: "Brique", specialising in contemporary literature, "Eux & nous", in which French writers discuss the authors of classical Antiquity, and "Trésors de la nouvelle", which, as its name suggests, specialises in short stories. He published the first French translation of a collection of poetry by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thousand-and-First Ship (Mille et un navires), and himself translated the play The Vegetable (Un legume). He also translated the first French edition of a collection of Oscar Wilde’s journalism, Aristotle at an Afternoon Tea (Aristote à l'heure du thé). Charles Dantzig also oversaw the publication of Marcel Schwob’s complete works (Œuvres, Les Belles Lettres).

Les Belles Lettres published his early essays, including Il n'y a pas d'Indochine (1995) and La Guerre du cliché (1998), and his poetry collections Que le siècle commence (1996, awarded the prix Paul Verlaine), Ce qui se passe vraiment dans les toiles de Jouy (1999), and À quoi servent les avions ? (2001), which foreshadowed the events of 9/11. He later wrote, “A few people have said to me that the mysterious power of poetry is such that it foresees events. I’m not so sure. […] Poetry reasons rather than foresees. The result – as in all literature, and even in all works of art – is thought. Except that rather than obtaining it by sparking speculations, it does so by sparking images, within the demands of rhythm, and in some cases, prosody” (J'ai interrompu très tôt une carrière de poète). A selection of his poems was published in 2003 with the title En souvenir des long-courriers. 2003 also saw the publication of the Bestiaire, a collection of animal poetry.

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