Of Spanish father and French mother, divided between two idioms, Claude Esteban was marked by the painful feeling of a division and an exile in the language, which was at the source of his poetic vocation. He recalled this experiment in
Le Partage des mots (
The Division of Words), a kind of autobiographical essay about language and the impossible bilingualism, which led him to poetry and to the choice of French as his poetic language. Dominated by this feeling of a "partage", he had as a concern for "gathering the scattered", exceeding separations, and thus joining together poetry and painting, translating foreign poetries into French, writing to find an immediate bond between oneself and the sensitive world. He was a contributor to the
Mercure de France from 1964, then to the
Nouvelle Revue Française, in which he wrote many articles on poets and painters. In 1973, he founded the literary magazine
Argile, at
Maeght, with the moral support of
René Char: its twenty-four issues testified to the complicity between poetry and painting, while granting a new space to translated foreign poetry. He also dedicated a monograph to
Chillida, and to
Palazuelo, and wrote prefaces for many exhibitions catalogs of painters such as
Raoul Ubac,
Vieira da Silva,
Arpad Szenes,
Castro,
Fermín Aguayo,
Giorgio Morandi,
Josef Sima,
Bacon,
Giacometti,
Braque,
Le Brocquy,
Chagall, etc. (Most of these texts were published again in volumes, see infra). In 1968, he published his first book of poems,
La Saison dévastée (
The Season of Devastation), quickly followed by other books made with artists such as
Arpad Szenes,
Jean Bazaine and
Raoul Ubac. These books were gathered in his first large collection of poems, published by Flammarion in 1979,
Terres, travaux du cœur (
Earthes, works of heart). At the same time, he published
Un lieu hors de tout lieu (
A Place out of any Place), an essay on poetry which, starting from the initial evocation of
Virgil's
Georgics, builds a reflection on poetry and a manifesto for new poetics, marked by the nostalgia of "a place out of any place" and by "a duty to seek" a new "conjuncture" between words and things. He experienced very early on a deep admiration for the work of the great Spanish poet
Jorge Guillén; they became friends, and he translated in 1977 most of Guillén's major book,
Cántico for
Éditions Gallimard — Guillén himself translated into Spanish some of Esteban's poems, which he inserted in his last book,
Final (1982). Esteban also translated many
Octavio Paz's works, such as
El Mono gramático (
The Monkey Grammarian). In 1980, under the title of
Poèmes parallèles, he published an anthology of his translations, of which the preface, "Traduire", sets down the principles of an original reflection on poetics and on the translation of poetry. In 1987, he collected his essays on poetry and poetics in
Critique de la raison poétique (
Critique of Poetic Reason). In 1984, he received the
Mallarmé prize for the prose poems of
Conjoncture du corps et du jardin (
Conjuncture of Body and Garden). The same year, he founded the
Poésie collection at the Editions Flammarion, in which he published a new generation of poets. In 1989, three years after the death of his wife —the painter
Denise Esteban—, he wrote
Elégie de la mort violente (
Elegy of the Violent Death), poems about mourning and memory. In 1993, he wrote ''Sept jours d'hier
(Seven Days of yesterday
), a remarkable suite of dense short poems that follow the "routes of mourning" and opens up the way of an appeasement. Deeply marked by the figure of King Lear, he published in 1996 Sur la dernière lande
(On the last Heath''), poems of wandering that evoke the figures of Shakespeare's tragedy. The year after, the
Société des gens de lettres (SGDL) awarded him the Grand Prix of poetry for his whole work. Painting remained for him a major interest. In 1991, he received the France Culture Prize for
Soleil dans une pièce vide (
Sun in an empty Room), poetic narrations inspired by
Edward Hopper's paintings. He continued to write essays on art and published some luminous approaches of
Velázquez,
Goya,
El Greco,
Claude Lorrain,
Rembrandt,
Murillo..., until his last essay dedicated to
Caravaggio, ''L'Ordre donnée à la nuit
(The Order given to the Night''), in which he draws the outlines of his art approach. It is still painting, that of the
Faiyum portraits, which caused the writing of a splendid suite of poems,
Fayoum, published in 2001 by
Gallimard in
Morceaux de ciel, presque rien (
Pieces of sky, hardly anything), that earned him the
Prix Goncourt of poetry. In 2004, he published his ultimate reflections on poetry in
Ce qui retourne au silence (
What returns to silence), which also includes an essay on
Robert Bresson and another on
Varlam Shalamov's
Kolyma Tales. He had been a student of the prestigious
École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and was professor of Spanish literature at the
Paris-Sorbonne University until 1996, and then he became President of the Maison des Ecrivains (the French Writers House) from 1998 to 2004. Shortly before his death, an anthology of his poems came out —
Le Jour à peine écrit (1967-1992) (
The Day scarcely written) — while the manuscript of his last book and poetic legacy was completed under the title of
La Mort à distance (
Death at a distance); it was published by
Gallimard in May 2007. ==Awards==