«Au bord du chemin». Nicolas Bouvier e l’estetica della sparizione

Throughout his life, traveller, poet and iconographer Nicolas Bouvier was—in the words of Jean Starobinski—a “collector of images.” This article outlines the aesthetics of disappearance of “Le Dehors et le Dedans” (1998), his only book of poetry. In the wake of poets such as Victor Segalen, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux and Vladimír Holan, Bouvier explored the relationship between travel and writing. For him, both travel and writing were ascetic experiences, a sort of existential dispossession to make room for the voice of poetry. As Anne Marie Jaton pointed out, his poems are made of “words of secrecy, anxiety and shadow” that visit the poet from time to time. In the elusiveness of his verses, silence expands, becoming a space to cross and question.