Soif et Puits dans la poésie française de Benjamin Fondane
Thirst and Well in Benjamin Fondane’s French Poetry

Summary/Abstract: A study of Benjamin Fondane’s imaginary, the essay makes use of methodology deriving from mythocriticism (in particular from the work of Gaston Bachelard) in order to concentrate on the literary treatment of thirst and wells in Fondane’s French poetry. The theme of thirst remains ambivalent because it is at once an Ulyssean thirst for knowledge and an existential thirst, thirst of the real and the thirst of others. The well also includes numerous values – of life and of death – and becomes a real Center in a frequently tragic landscape. In one of the last poems, the well is inscribed in a meditation on the abyss, where water is transmuted into a stymphalized water in an underground relation to memory.

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