Gustaf Sobin was a U.S.-born poet and author who spent most of his adult life in France. Originally from Boston, Sobin attended the Choate School, Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, and moved to Paris in 1962. Eventually he settled in the village of Goult, Provence

Provence

Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...

, where he remained for over forty years, publishing more than a dozen books of poetry, four novels, a children's story, and two compilations of essays.

Sobin maintained his expatriate status until his death in July, 2005 of pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer refers to a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 95% of these tumors is adenocarcinoma, which arises within the exocrine component of the pancreas. A minority arises from the islet cells and is classified as a...

 at the age of 69.

Life and work

After studies with René Char

René Char

René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...

, Gustaf Sobin developed a poetic style that relies heavily on assonance

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...

 and consonance

Consonance

Consonance is a stylistic device, most commonly used in poetry and songs, characterized by the repetition of the same consonant two or more times in short succession, as in "pitter patter" or in "all mammals named Sam are clammy".Consonance should not be confused with assonance, which is the...

, as well as other methods of the sonic organization of speech. He published many books across different genres: fiction, essays, and translations (including a translation of Henri Michaux

Henri Michaux

Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...

's Ideograms in China, a prose poem about Chinese orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

). More recent translations include The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, two volumes from Char's work of the mid to late 1960s that Sobin chose to translate in full, published posthumously in 2009, side by side with Char's French text.

Among his many books are Breath's Burials (poetry, New Directions, 1995), Luminous Debris (1999) and Ladder of Shadows (2008) (essays, University of California Press), and Collected Poetry (as of 2009: forthcoming, Talisman House). Among his works of fiction are the novels The Fly Truffler (about the art of truffle-hunting in Southern France), and In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star, which is a chronicle of a brief period of Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...

's early acting career.

Gustaf Sobin was survived by his wife, Susannah Bott, his daughter Esther, his son Gabriel, an older brother Harris, of Phoenix, Arizona, and his devoted cousin, Mikki Ansin of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sobin's brother Harris, an architect and architectural historian, designed the rehabilitation of Gustaf Sobin's residence and two additions for a historic stone cocoonery in Provence, France.

Before his death, Sobin named U.S. poets Andrew Joron

Andrew Joron

Andrew Joron is an American writer of experimental poetry. He began by writing science fiction poetry. Joron's later poetry, combining scientific and philosophical ideas with the sonic properties of language, has been compared to the work of the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov...

 and Andrew Zawacki

Andrew Zawacki

Andrew Zawacki is an American poet, critic, editor, and translator. His first book By Reason of Breakings won the 2001 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series, chosen by Forrest Gander....

 as the co-executors of his literary estate.

A Select bibliography

• The Tale of the Yellow Triangle. With illustrations by Jolaine Meyer and text by Gustaf Sobin. G. Braziller (1973).
• Wind Chrysalid's Rattle. Montemora Foundation (1980).
• Caesurae: Midsummer. Blue Guitar Books (1981).
• Celebration of the Sound Through. Montemora Foundation (1982).
• The Earth as Air. New Directions (1984).
• Voyaging Portraits. New Directions (1988).
• Venus Blue: a Novel. Little Brown (1991).
• Dark Mirrors: a Novel of Provence. Bloomsbury (1992).
• By the Bias of Sound: Selected Poems, 1974-1994. Talisman House (1995).
• Breath’s Burials: Poems. New Directions (1995).
• Gustaf Sobin. A reading, February 7, 1996 in the Modern Languages Auditorium, sponsored by The University of Arizona Poetry Center.
• A World of Letters: Poems. Arcturus Editions (1998).
• Article of Light and Elation. Cadmus Editions (1998).
• Toward the Blanched Alphabets. Talisman House (1998).
• Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc. University of California Press
  University of California Press
  University of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish books and papers for the faculty of the University of California, established 25 years earlier in 1868...
  
   (1999).
• The Fly-Truffler: a Novel. Norton (2000).
• Ideograms in China. Henri Michaux, translated from the French by Gustaf Sobin. New Directions (2002).
• In the Name of the Neither. Talisman House (2002).
• In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star: a Novel. Norton (2002).
• The Places as Preludes. Talisman House (2005).
• Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc. University of California Press (2009).
• The Brittle Age and Returning Upland. Rene Char. Translated by Gustaf Sobin. Counterpath (2009).
• Aura: Last Essays. Counterpath (2009).

Poetry

• The Earth As Air (New Directions, NY, 1984. 103pp, paperbound)
• Miniatures (Cadmus Editions, San Francisco, 1986: 200 copies, privately distributed)
• Voyaging Portraits (New Directions, NY, 1988. 121pp, pb)
• Breath's Burials (New Directions, NY, 1995. 101pp, pb)
• By the Bias of Sound: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (Talisman House, Jersey City, NJ, 1995. 169pp, pb)
• Towards the Blanched Alphabets (Talisman House, 1998. 123pp, h/c & pb)
• Articles of Light & Elation (Cadmus, 1998. 50pp)
• In the Name of the Neither (Talisman House, 2002. 57pp, pb)
• The Places as Preludes (Talisman House, 2005, 76pp, pb)
• Collected Poems (Talisman House, 2010, 756pp, pb)

Prose, fiction & essays

• Venus Blue (Bloomsbury, London, 1991, out of print) - novel
• Dark Mirrors (Bloomsbury, 1992, out of print) - novel
• The Fly-Truffler (Norton, New York, 1999) - novel
• Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 1999. 247pp, pb) - essays
• In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star (Norton, NY, 2002) - novel
• (translator) Ideograms in China by Henri Michaux; (New Directions, NY, 2002. 64pp, pb)
• Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 2009. 208pp. pb, hc) - essays- companion volume to Luminous Debris

External links

• Obituary at Guardian Unlimited
• SHEARSMAN BOOKS:– Recommendations features a comprehensive listing of books by Sobin
• "Sparkling signatures" Edmund Hardy reviews The Places As Preludes on-line at "Jacket Magazine" (number 31 : October 2006)
• I had an “aha moment” reading René Char’s "The Brittle Age and Returning Upland" Ron Silliman
  Ron Silliman
  Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...
  
  's essay on Sobin's translations of two books of poetry by Sobin's friend and mentor Rene Char
• Gustaf Sobin Archive located at the Yale University's Beinecke Library

Multimedia, audio & video files

• Words Through: A Tribute to Gustaf Sobin video recordings from the panel celebrating the life and work of Gustaf Sobin on March 6, 2010 at the University of Arizona Poetry Center