PUBLISHED by ROMARIN
28 september 2021*
Suzanne RENAUD, Bohuslav REYNEK : Lettres à Annette – Dopisy Annette [Letters to Annette]
Bilingual critical edition in French and Czech.
Translated from the French by Dagmar and František Halas.
Foreword by Annick Auzimour.
Color illustrations: two workss by Bohuslav Reynek, photographies.
Black and white illustrations within the text: photographies by Daniel Reynek,
Jiří Škoch, Pavel Jasanský, Pavel Šindelář, Annick Roy.
Published with support of the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the Renaud-Reynek Endowment Fund (France).
Format 12,5 x 19 cm.
260 pages. Softbound, illustrated cover.
ISBN 2–910544-20-6
Price 10 €
In the 1960s, after a period of destitution and isolation on their Petrkov farmstead, which had become a kolkhoz, Suzanne Renaud and Bohuslav Reynek welcomed many visitors who had come to see the engraver’s art. Faithful friends they had met in Dauphiné between the wars came from France. In 1963 “Annette”, a young woman from Grenoble, spent the month of September in Petrkov. “The impulse that made her drive across so many kilometres did not only please the poet; for his wife it was a drop of living water that fell from the sky. […] [Thirty years later] she founded the ‘Romarin–Les Amis de Suzanne Renaud et Bohuslav Reynek’ association in Grenoble.” (Jiří Šerých, Il y a bien longtemps).
Excerpts
“It was November-December, it rained almost continuously, a soft, blackish rain. There were small clearings where you could go out and pick blackberries in the brambles on the moor. To find chestnuts but all hollow. See pretty black and white cows in the broom. I lived in a small hotel that had a plaque indicating that G. Flaubert had stayed there. In the evenings I read poems in the company of rats that came out of the walls and the floor.”
(Bohuslav Reynek, August 9, 1963)
“Our hospitality is that which can be offered by impoverished people in a once beautiful but now dilapidated house, being themselves old and tired, without any household help, which means that it has many shortcomings and that you will have to bring a good deal of indulgence and understanding. In return, we will offer you some new experiences, some of which at least will be interesting, and the charm of a country very different from ours.”
(Suzanne Renaud, August 12, 1963)
“The shadows lengthen and the shadows of the shadows. One is more and more astonished, becomes almost mute. Silence plunges its fingers in the winter mist, draws there I do not know what. The inner fire does not go out, throws small flames and burns, and burns – hard. If you are happy, say thank you. I wish you were. Here you are loved as always. This cannot change, it is for eternity.”
(Bohuslav Reynek, December 30, 1969)
*The book Lettres à Annette / Dopisy Annette will be available for purchase online on the “Editorial Catalogue” page of the site (https://renaud-reynek.com/catalogue-editorial/) from 2 October 2021.
