Fondane’s major collections of poetry in French are gathered in Le Mal des fantômes, first published in 1980 and most recently, in 2006, in a new edition edited by Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou with Monique Jutrin (Paris: Éditions Verdier). The title of that volume, the order of its contents, and its texts all reflect Fondane’s specific instructions, which were carefully laid out in a letter to his wife from the camp at Drancy during his internment in March and April 1944. This selection follows that order and those texts, except that it begins with two of Fondane’s cinepoems that he did not include in Le Mal des fantômes.
The cinepoems first appeared as Trois scenarii: Ciné-poèmes (Brussels: Les Documents internationaux de l’esprit nouveau, 1928). They are reprinted in Écrits pour le cinéma: Le muet et le parlant, edited by Michel Carassou, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, and Ramona Fotiade (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2007).
Ulysse, which Fondane began on his way to Argentina in 1929 and completed on his return to France later that year, was published in Cahiers du Journal des poètes in 1933. A later version, incorporating additions and changes that were made during the war, appears in Le Mal des fantômes.
The sequence Le Mal des fantômes was written between 1942 and 1943; excerpts appeared in Cahiers du Sud 268 (October/November 1944). The entire sequence appeared for the first time in Le Mal des fantômes.
Titanic, written in the course of Fondane’s 1936 visit to Argentina, came out the next year in Cahiers du Journal des poètes. Fondane subsequently rejected a number of poems from that edition and made minor corrections to others.
L’Exode: Super flumina Babylonis was largely composed in 1934, between Ulysses and Titanic, although “Preface in Prose” and “Interlude” were added in 1943 or 1944. Unpublished in Fondane’s lifetime, the book, edited by Claude Sernet, first appeared in 1965 (Veilhès: La Fenètre ardente).
The poems in Au temps du poème et Poèmes épars were composed between 1940 and 1944 but not published in Fondane’s lifetime. They first came out in 1978 in Non Lieu no. 2–3, edited by Michel Carassou.