Philippe Jaccottet Research Articles

“L’Allegria” e l’haiku: due modelli letterari in “Airs” di Philippe Jaccottet

Within the wider literary production of Philippe Jaccottet, generally composed in prose or long verses, Airs’unique stylistic brevity brings us to evaluate how his readings and his literary translations have influenced the poet’s own verses. During the composition of Airs, the Franco-Swiss poet shows interest in modesty and lightness of the haiku model and he reflects, at the same time, on conciseness and condensation of Ungaretti’s first work, L’Allegria. If compared with the ancient form of Japanese poetry and with the deconstruction of canonical rhythm achieved by Ungaretti, the suggestion of the two literary lessons is recognizable in a metric analysis of Airs’ poems. A focus on subject posture in poetic discourse, as well as a thematic analysis of the three different poetics, reveals similar imagery and ethical position: inclined to the progressive absence of subjectivity in haiku and Jaccottet’s poems, tending to a collective voice in Ungaretti’s intention. While the influence of haiku on Airs is already established from critical studies on the author, the specific weight of Ungaretti’s Allegria on Jaccottet’s verses still seems unexplored. Considering the influence of haiku, of which L’Allegria is also permeated, our study shall aim at verifying how the early production of Ungaretti affects Jaccottet’s stylistic choices, thematic imagery, and ethical purpose.

Pierre ChappuisA Notebook of Clouds by John TaylorJohn TaylorA Notebook of Ridges

as de Sola keeps faith with many aspects of poetry’s great tradition, she’s also, in an unshowy way, an original. Daniel Brown Baldwin, New York Christy Lefteri The Beekeeper of Aleppo New York. Ballantine. 2019. 317 pages. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in Canada in 2016, The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows a couple fleeing the destruction of the Syrian war to Turkey and Greece as they journey toward their remaining family in Britain. Captivating from the very first page, the book couldn’t be more timely. A rich, gentle voice and beautiful imagery combine almost ironically with individual and systemic atrocities to convey the absolute devastation of war. The book has a dreamlike quality: certain sections are clear and concrete while others are more nebulous, and the plotline moves in time and space as a dream does, or as memories do for trauma victims. The symbolism of bees in the book is masterful. Bees are socially dependent creatures that often represent the life and health of their ecosystem. Small and fragile yet tenacious beyond belief, they can easily be seen as kindred souls to Nuri and Afra, the main characters in the novel. When nothing remains for them in Aleppo, Nuri longs to be reunited with his cousin and apiary partner in Britain. His wife, Afra, has sustained almost more damage than one individual can survive. It would be cliché to simply say that they need each other to survive the journey to a new life; the book goes much further, into the angst and grief that surround them as they cling, alternately at times, to the bond that has been deeply forged by shared pain. The author herself is the daughter of Cypriot refugees and brings a compassionate eye to the inter- and intrapersonal effects of loss and displacement. Lefteri has done more than tell the story of Syrian refugees; she has given flesh and blood to the many instances of political unrest that we see daily on our screens. Her studies in the field of psychotherapy and her work at a UNICEF center for refugees in Greece give her a deft hand and show a genuine heart. She has created an opportunity for readers to become more human in their understanding of current events and the acute suffering that accompanies them. Joy Walsh Butler, Pennsylvania Books in Review Pierre Chappuis A Notebook of Clouds Trans. John Taylor John Taylor A Notebook of Ridges Les Brouzils, France. The Fortnightly Review. 2019. 160 pages. A UNIQUELY VALUED genre in French letters is the cahier or carnet (notebook or journal). These collections are often like commonplace books and usually include not just pieces in verse form and prose texts but “notes, fragments , quotations, wordplay, and even meteorological facts” (to quote John Taylor) plus a host of other kinds of seemingly incidental writings including aphorisms, diary entries, and just random jottings. Taylor, the author of one of the cahiers under review and the translator of the other, is also one of our most astute critics of contemporary French letters as well as the translator of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, arguably one of the two best writers in this genre. The other, Philippe Jaccottet, succinctly identifies the premise behind this kind of writing in his axiom “Glance, do not aim.” There is an inherent paradox in the cahier genre itself, identified by Chappuis in what his editor/translator here calls “A Preliminary Sketch.” This “sketch” precedes chronologically the cahier proper entitled A Notebook of Clouds, a composition that, the sketch speculates, “would presuppose a more or less incoherent sequence, a jumble of notes, spontaneous jottings: but some pieces have taken form.” The forms taken may be verse or obviously restructured “poetic” prose. The “confrontation of the two kinds of writing [creates] . . . similarities and divergences, parallels, as they overtake each other, ‘pursue’ each other.” This tension is what both the writer and reader of the cahier genre need to embrace. Taylor’s interpretive suggestion: “The book forms a whole that must be read as such.” Perhaps. My own experience reading such “books” is that they are all entries in search of a whole, one that the reader, as often as not, needs to supply. By now...

Saisie du sensible dans les carnets de Philippe Jaccottet : Reprises et variations

In his La Semaison notebooks written since the 1950s, Philippe Jaccottet is experiencing his relationship to the world through sensitive epiphanies. Writing about the Drôme landscapes, literary works, paintings, musical pieces, and more and more night dreams over the years, he cultivates his sensitive emotions. As both separate fragment and part of the notebook, the note links sensation to interpretation in a two-step process: the poet first grasps his sensitive emotion; he secondly reinterprets it at length often using analogies or reprising it later in another note. A literary published work as well as a laboratory focusing on the craft of writing, the notebook then becomes an esthetic object teeming with relations between sensation and interpretation, rhythm and space, repetition and variation, continuity and discontinuity. Since the 1990s, Jaccottet has transposed this flexible – almost musical – poetics in his poetic works like Cahier de verdure or Après beaucoup d’années.

Le Paysage comme aire transitionnelle dans l’œuvre de Philippe Jaccottet

ABSTRACTThe landscape is a point of passage between the self and the world, the interior and the exterior, the near and the distant, the real and the imaginary: as such, it has become a privileged theme for the field of poetry aiming to reach the world in spite of the distance separating words and things. This paradoxical relationship is particularly inscribed in the motif of the horizon, defining the landscape while remaining unattainable: it serves as a threshold between here and elsewhere, the earth and the sky, the visible and the invisible. The interchanges that take place in this virtual space are at the very core of landscape poetics, especially prevalent in French and Francophone poetry since the Second World War: I will examine its historical, artistic, and literary implications. I will study the dynamics and aporias in Philippe Jaccottet's work, where images of the threshold, the door, and passage are recurring.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Not only does Highway justify forgery, he also happily engages in plagiarism— in other words, intertextuality. He often quotes his “uncles,” including Juan Sánchez Baudrillard, Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, and other famous figures. These quotations shift the atmosphere of the text depending on the reader’s degree of familiarity with these authors, but they are playful enough for us not to get confused even if we don’t get the erudite allusions. Luiselli’s novel is not only for those initiated into postmodern theory. It is the result of meaningful engagement not only with literary giants but with the real world as well, an engagement that connects this otherwise lighthearted and elusive little book to the ground, injecting fresh blood into postmodern techniques. As Luiselli explains in her afterword, she was originally commissioned to write a work of fiction for the exhibition catalog of an art gallery that is funded by a juice factory. Instead, she decided to write a novel in installments , in collaboration with the workers of the factory, located in Ecatepec, outside Mexico City. The exposure of collaborative efforts involved in making this book would not be complete without making the translator ’s presence explicit. Luiselli’s translator , Christina MacSweeney, contributed a delightful timeline that is just as helpful as it is disorienting: besides giving signposts (political and literary events that took place during Highway’s lifetime), MacSweeney also added some random, insignificant events. Other insertions in the book include mottos by philosophers of language, aphorisms taken from Chinese fortune cookies, and a collection of photos of artwork as well as buildings and scenes in Ecatepec taken by factory workers. A fundamental openness and curiosity make Luiselli’s work fresh and exciting. She is serious in her engagement with art, literature, and society without being arrogant or sententious—she is part of all those games, and is happy to acknowledge it. The topic she explores—fiction enhancing the value of an object—is quite pertinent in an age when the fate of so many people depends on hyperbolic personal statements, résumés, or news items. Ágnes Orzóy Budapest Anthony Marra. The Tsar of Love and Techno. New York. Hogarth. 2015. 332 pages. After the signal achievement of Anthony Marra’s first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), one returns with pleasure to Chechnya and Russia for more memorable characters, conflicts, and absurdity. This time, from the Russian perspective, there is less fatality in the air than individual deaths and disappearances, understood well enough so that those who adapt quickly might survive. If one is clever , one can even maintain certain constancies behind a chameleon exterior. One functionary has “ascended to the rank of commissar by welcoming the lunacy the world so graciously handed him.” There is a deputy curator whose art museum has been destroyed, with its best paintings sent to Moscow, who keeps damaged paintings in his apartment. In his new position as tourist director, he restores Grozny, rated the most devastated in the world, by painting word-pictures of buildings that were once standing for Chinese tourists. Or the former art student, now a leading censor of photographs, carefully airbrushing out disgraced persons from historic pictures, sometimes extending background, sometimes replacing the face with an unknown or anonymous person. His constancy consists in the face he repeatedly inserts, his brother at various ages, an unknown man who was executed, supposedly for being too religious. Naïm Kattan Farida Norman Cornett & Antonio D’Alfonso, tr. Guernica Editions Naïm Kattan places his sensual and passionate love story in a situation rife with conflict in Iraq before the advent of World War II. Religious, political, and cultural clashes are juxtaposed with intense matters of the heart as Farida, a Jewish cabernet singer, embarks on an ardent, tortured romance complicated by jealousy and ambitions. Kattan’s simple yet lush prose, ably rendered by Norman Cornett and Antonio D’Alfonso, draws the reader into this compelling tale set in a unique environment. Philippe Jaccottet The Pilgrim’s Bowl (Giorgio Morandi) John Taylor, tr. Seagull Books Words, though imperfect and imprecise, allow Philippe Jaccottet to develop and explore his reactions to the artwork of Giorgio Morandi...

Samuel Beckett 3: les “dramaticules” by Llewellyn Brown

THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 88, No. 3, March 2015 Printed in U.S.A. Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger 203 Brown, Llewellyn, éd. Samuel Beckett 3: les “dramaticules”. Caen: Minard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-256-91173-6. Pp. 332. 24 a. Beckett invented the term“dramaticule”to refer to some of the short plays that he wrote late in his career. The articles of this third volume focus on the specificity of minimalist writings for the stage where characters and situations are reduced to the most basic elements. In addition, we are reminded of the place of these texts in Beckett’s oeuvre. The main part of the volume is divided into three thematic sections, each of which highlights a different aspect of the “dramaticules.” Fortunately for readers less familiar with the short plays, Brown’s Avant-propos and his introductory article guide us towards an understanding of the neologism from which the book takes its title. Rather than providing a pat definition, Brown plays with the ambiguity of the term and allows us to see that, as a genre, the “dramaticules” are in part recognizable by the way Beckett uses the medium of theater, but also by an overarching sense of derision that characterizes their themes. This leads to the first section,“Effets de genre,” where much attention is paid to the theatricality of these texts. Among other aspects of the“dramaticule,”Beckett’s use of the monologue is studied in detail in this section where the authors emphasize the complex relationship between the narrative, the stage directions and the varied theatrical functions of monologues. Part 2, “Présence et Absence,” examines these coexisting yet contradictory aspects of Beckett’s texts. The concrete nature of the theatre, even in its most minimalist expressions, requires that there be some “presence” and the analyses here show how Beckett pushes the limits, forcing us to question the very definition of that term. Is physical presence more“real” than memory? Are the ghosts that haunt Beckett’s characters less present than the characters themselves? Well-written and clear, the articles provide insight into this paradoxical aspect of the “dramaticules.” In “Voix,” the third section of the volume, articles focus on the poetic rhythm of Beckett’s language and the role of speaker and listener, of actor and spectator, of reader and author. We, as readers, are called upon to become more attentive to such factors as we navigate between the worlds that Beckett proposes in his short plays. These articles might be best appreciated if accompanied by close re-reading of the works in question, in particular Solo / A Piece of Monologue and Berceuse / Rockaby. The last two articles in the volume represent a rather abrupt change in focus. A study of Beckett as a reader of Dante brings new details to light but discusses Dante’s influence on a wide variety of Beckett’s works. The “Témoignage” elucidates the intercultural challenges of translating Beckett’s theater into Hebrew. Following these are several critical book reviews that supply additional updated resources for Beckett scholars. Given the paucity of research devoted specifically to the “dramaticules,” this volume is a welcome addition to the corpus of Beckett studies. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Chauvin, Cédric. Référence épique et modernité. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 9872 -7453-2343-9. Pp. 356. 80 a. Chauvin studies recent revivals of interest in the epic in Georges Dumézil’s writings on the Indian Mahabharata (1968–2003),Philippe Jaccottet’s translation of the Odyssey (1953–2004), Pierre Klossowski’s translation of the Aeneid (1964 and 1989), and the novels of Jean Giono, Julien Gracq, and Claude Simon. Current consensus defines the epic genre only as a “long narrative poem.” Traditionally, Homer’s epics were seen as “historical,” whereas Virgilian and Aristotelian models were considered esthetic narrative structures. Macpherson’s “Ossianic” poems deconstructed this distinction for his contemporaries by claiming to recover ancient history from Bardic fragments of supposedly collective memories. Chauvin misses the powerful force of artistic elaboration in Arthurian legend (history refers to that king in only one line, as the victor of the Battle of Badon Hill), and the...

«Médula en traducción». Rilke, Creeley y Jaccottet en tres poetas españoles (Juan Andrés García Román, Marcos Canteli y Rafael José Díaz)

Este artĂ­culo analiza las traducciones de tres poetas llevadas a cabo por tres jĂłvenes poetas españoles: Rainer Maria Rilke por Juan AndrĂŠs GarcĂ­a RomĂĄn, Robert Creeley por Marcos Canteli y Philippe Jaccottet por Rafael-JosĂŠ DĂ­az. Se pretende indagar sobre los motivos y repercusiones de la labor traductora de un poeta. En los tres casos, comprobaremos las distintas tĂŠcnicas de traducciĂłn de estos poetas y cĂłmo sus traducciones estĂĄn relacionadas con su propia obra poĂŠtica. La dedicaciĂłn intensiva a la traducciĂłn de tres grandes poetas de las literaturas de lengua alemana, inglesa y francesa muestra la amplitud de intereses por los poetas mĂĄs innovadores en la poesĂ­a española contemporĂĄnea.

La poésie de Philippe Jaccottet : réparer l’absence, « à la frontière de Dieu »

In 1961 Philippe Jaccottet wrote: "The best answer to all kinds of questions is the poem’s very absence of a response". In keeping with the elusive nature of the world, abandoned by the gods and by God, the poem remains mysterious, thus trans-lating as well as preserving the inexhaustible richness of Nature and human beings. So the poet not only accepts such a precarious situation, but learns from it. Nevertheless, when someone dear dies, the poet tends to deny the absence of the loved one and revolts against it, since there no longer are any signs of presence: merely incomprehensible absence. Yet he chooses to bear witness, even if he remains ignorant and weak. In effect, this is a duty: poetry provides a link which enables the separation to avoid becoming a definitive absence. Words are repairing shuttles.

Petite topologie du temps à l’usage de la critique : l’exemple de « Paysages avec figures absentes » de Philippe Jaccottet

This paper seeks to demonstrate that, far from being an absolute given of human experience, the linearity of time is just one conceptual monster among others, which literature can easily escape when it fully inhabits the spatial world, as experienced and defined through the senses. Inspired by the works of phenomenologist David Abram, whose “topology of time” is articulated around a structural isomorphism between our conception of time and our perception of it, the author will show how this hypothesis can be witnessed in literature and that consequently, the “topology of time” can provide literary criticism with a surprisingly flexible yet precise tool. After presenting the outline of his reading grid, the author will apply its principles to the analysis of “Paysages avec figures absentes,” the first section of the eponymous work by Philippe Jaccottet, and describe how investing the landscape as perceived by the senses allows the poet to install a conception of temporality where the articulation of past, present, and future completely disregards the supposed linearity of time's arrow.

Effacement Eclipsed: The Texture of Voice in Jaccottet's L’Ignorant

There is a “poethical” imperative in the work of Philippe Jaccottet—a determined “effacement” of the writing subject—that has led many critics to ignore the distinct texture of this poet's voice. The present study attempts to reveal the complexity of this voice, showing how Jaccottet draws on the most expressive resources of language, while simultaneously negotiating the problematic manifestation of subjectivity that accompanies such expression. Focusing on the collection L’Ignorant, through close analysis of key poems—including the articulations required by salient phonetic patterns—we find that the sense of illumination transmitted throughout these texts cannot simply be ascribed to the poet's ability to serve as a passive medium for nature. Rather, such effects derive in large part from the composition of text—a conscious act of poïesis that reveals the limitations, as well as the continuing potential, of lyric expression.

Archipelago (a collapse)

* < s CL O CL '5 O u cr u§ $ O O x Q. Archipelago (a collapse) Antonella Anedda Redandgrey; a broken crown ofsaltandgranite. Abreeze seeping from theheart oftherocks. I fell under thefewclouds onedayinthefull springtime with a bushbent under mybody andthewholepromontory atmyneck. I hadsandinmyears,thedog'spaw uneasy atmytemples. A disturbance weknowfrom dreams themoment movement meets theenigma ofspace. Alltheislands flew apart recreating exactly thevoidbetween thestones, refueling themselves with windatevery stop. Theboulders sprang off whistling likeslings as far as myfrozen feet andbreathing wasa bristling trunk toswallow with eyestight shut as far as theroots. Atfirst there wasthehouse, grey andperfect in thesunlight, butoutofkilter - oldnails, a chair then that whistling interspersed with voices, twochildren anda dog'stongue likea touch oftheinfinite atmythroat. Perhaps itwasthis that showedfate howthelifeline still burned inme whentheskinned handmoved tobrush awaya fly aimedunflinchingly skywards. Translation from the Italian ByJamie McKendrick Antonella Aneddahaspublished several books ofpoems, including Residenze invemali (1992); Notti dipaceoccidental (1999), which won the Premio Eugenio Montale; IIcatalogo delta gioia (2003); andDalbalcone del corpo (2007), which won the Premio Napoli and the Dedalus Prize. Shehas translated Ovid, Philippe Jaccottet, andAnne Carson, among others, andhas written three books of essays onpoetry. Jamie McKendrick haspublished five books ofpoetry, most recently Crocodiles & Obelisks (2008). Heedited The Faber Book of20th-century Italian Poems, andhistranslation ofValerio Magrelli's poems, The Embrace (2009), won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the John Florio Prize. 52 1 World Literature Today ...

Philippe Jaccottet: L'Evidence du simple et l'eclat de l'obscur

This lavish, ernormously knowledgeable book is a weath of judicious insights into Jaccottet's oeuvre and postwar French poetry generally. It draws from a wide range of sources, including interviews with Jaccottet and his correspondance. The style, however, is often more celebratory and allusive than strictly analytical, making the book better suited for readers already familiar with Jaccottet than for undergraduate students. Those keen to refresh their appreciation of the poet, and unfazed by 547 pages of flourished, in parts somewhat profuse, French, may enjoy Jean-Claude Mathieu's prose. As an academic work, this book could be more user-friendly. Like many French books, it lacks a critical bibliography and an index, which is all the more problematic with a book of this size. In the table of contents, the only clue to the first 150 pages is this fragment: ‘Un petit roseau m'a suffi …’. Poems are rarely quoted in full. Referencing can be erratic: in some cases only the author's name is given: Rilke (p. 50) and Bataille (p. 448), for example. The first 150 pages retrace the poet's trajectory across the span of over forty publications since 1944, connecting the thematic and formal fluctuations to biographical turning points. The rest falls into three parts and fifteen chapters, but these fail to structure clear argumentative progress. Rather, Mathieu works out thematic approaches to Jaccottet's poetry through mazes of quotations and countless erudite parallels, from Dante to the German Romantics and Mallarmé. The emerging themes revolve around Jaccottet's poetic quest for ‘l'insaisissable’, or what the wandering subject gleans of the real as he walks through it — elusive, elemental impressions of the wind, light, colours, scents, the shifting seasons, the presence of death in the everyday. All are tentative glimpses at a presence which springs from the subject's underlying awareness of an absence: that of a harmonising principle to the world. The poet may risk ‘une réponse, à partir du manque-même’ (p. 40). Yet to reveal the fragmentary, ephemeral manifestations of the real, the poet needs to vanish (p. 478), to become ‘ignorant’. His task is merely to distil the words conveyed by the bare landscapes of Grignan (p. 260). Jaccottet's poetic asceticism makes him aspire to an impersonal voice, free of elevated diction or metaphorical departures. Notes and haikus, however chiselled, are most apt to recapture what is fleeting and immediate. Yet words, ‘longeant cet inconnu’ (p. 301), inevitably fail to grasp it: Jaccottet's poetry is haunted by this unresolved tension (p. 435). This central conflict appears more saliently in another monograph on the poet: Philippe Jaccottet, le pari de l'inactuel by Hervé Ferrage, which was published in the same month as the Mathieu. Leaner, more focused and accessible, Ferrage's book is a useful complement to it. More recently, Emma Wagstaff has developed analyses touched on by Mathieu, namely Jaccottet's ‘floating images’, his work as translator and his rapport to language and its failings: see Provisionality and the Poem: Transition in the Work of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël (Rodopi, 2006).

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat by Martin Munro

MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 55 I once more a time of need, the kind of thinking this collection brings within reach nevertheless turns thenecessity toendure it into a kind of good fortune. QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MARTIN CROWLEY Provisionality and thePoem: Transition in the Work ofDu Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noell. By EMMAWAGSTAFF. (Faux Titre, 278) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2006. 244 pp. E48. ISBN 978-90-420-I939-3. In his recently republished Eclisse, Jacques Dupin recalls the solitariness of the emergent post-war poetic voices of his own generation, who, unlike Char, Artaud, Michaux, or Ponge, had littleprospect of being published, doggedly pursuing their artwithout public recognition, in the shadow of the already verymuch moribund formsofResistance and Surrealist writing. Far removed from the limelight, forming no identifiable group, these poets developed highly individual practices shot through with a shared and far-reaching awareness of poetry's inherent unfixedness and pre cariousness, itsdrifts and deferrals, itspassingness and itsporousness, its incessant opening upon absence and otherness. In choosing to focus on provisionality in the work of threepoets of this generation, Emma Wagstaff gives precedence in a timely and lucid manner towhat Dupin himself-referred to a number of times in her study-identifies at the core of contemporary poetic endeavour: the question of be ing's place in theworld, and of the other in language. Andre Du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet, and Bernard Noel can be compared, she argues, 'because their texts always proffer instants and then leave thembehind' (p. 2 I4). Theirs is a poetry ofmovement and transition in time and space, caught up in an endless making and remaking, in a difficultbringing into being, that counters mimetic representation while defying the constraints of selfhood and identity.However, Wagstaff also takes care to signal the differences between these poets, which she pinpoints byway ofwhat theirwork repeatedly favours: Jaccottet's hesitant images that hover and are leftbehind; Du Bouchet's insistence on gaps, intervals, and disruption; thedynamics ofNoel's 'elan' that imposes a sense of acceleration and self-generating language. This study has thegreatmerit of engaging thoughtfully and meticulously with the texts themselves, examining new kinds of rhythms generated therein through various formal devices, before proceeding to a very fruitfuland intriguing comparative analysis of evocations of air featured in all practices. The remaining three chapters extend discussion of provisionality by singling out crucial transitions between poetic language and that which stands as other to it,namely the visual arts, translation, and silence, sites of crossover and incursion essential to a proper understanding of thesewriters' creati vity.The result is an eminently accessible, rounded, and deft assessment of post-war poetry concerned with opening up word toworld, and thehuman subject to its myriad other, inan onward, earthbound movement which, as theauthor amply demonstrates, 'creates itsown times and depths of reading' (p. 220). UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN MICHAEL BROPHY Exile and Post-I946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferriere, Danti cat. By MARTIN MUNRO. (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 7) Liverpool:LiverpoolUniversityPress. 2007. viii+310pp. ?36.50. ISBN978 I-8463I-079-9. Martin Munro's introduction, 'Inhabiting Haiti', isworth reading and rereading for its rapid, far-ranging considerations of important events inHaitian history and the 552 Reviews development of theproblems of living in or outside ofHaiti. Munro espouses Anto nio Benitez-Rojo's view of the transportation of slaves toNew World colonies as 'the big bang of theCaribbean universe' (cited p. 26). The importation of slaves into the Caribbean resulted in themetissage of languages, religions, and biological strains. The phrase 'Post-1946 Haitian Literature' in the titleofMunro's study creates a slightly erroneous expectation. The date I946 is an allusion to the historic sequence of events leading up to theousting ofwartime president Elie Lescot, inearly January I946. Because Alexis and Depestre were leaders of the student-worker protests of late 1945, theywere given scholarships to study in France in the autumn of 1946. Munro's title alludes to the historical event, and not to a specifically literary date. Secondly, Munro's principal focus is narrowed to the thematic analysis of exile in novels published between I955 (Alexis, General Compere Soleil) and 2004 (Danticat, The Dew Breaker). Important short fictionbymost of thenamed authors isexcluded from Munro...

Loss and Presence in Three Poetic Texts of Mourning

In Truinas, le 21 avril 2001 Philippe Jaccottet recounts the funeral of Andre du Bouchet, which took place in Truinas on that day. (1) He describes the extraordinary non-ceremony; there was no liturgy, only a reading of du Bouchet's poem L'Avril, and informal addresses by friends and writers, including Jaccottet himself. (2) I shall discuss Jaccottet's text in conjunction with two others: Tubingen, le 22 mai 1986, in which du Bouchet responds to the work of Paul Celan, who died in 1970, and Yves Bonnefoy's L'Etranger de Giacometti, published in 1967 shortly after the death of Alberto Giacometti. (3) There are a number of connections between these figures, but the most important are ties of friendship. Jaccottet went to Truinas on the 21st of April 2001 to mourn his friend. Similarly, du Bouchet was a friend of Celan, as well as a translator of his work into French. Bonnefoy was not friends with Giacometti in quite the same way because he was born thirty years later than the artist, but Giacometti is famous for his friendships and associations with writers. Many writers considered they had affinities with him, and several of them collaborated on the journal L'Ephemere, the first issue of which was dedicated to his work. All issues would carry a Giacometti drawing of a standing nude on the front cover. Bonnefoy's text was published in this first number, alongside other tributes that included a piece by du Bouchet, although this is less easily described as a text of loss. Du Bouchet worked with Bonnefoy on the editorial board of L'Ephemere, and Jaccottet contributed occasionally to the journal. (4) With friendship, however, came difference. Bonnefoy is writing about an artist who worked in a different medium--plastic art--a medium that is other to language. Du Bouchet is discussing a writer to whom he felt very close, but who wrote in a foreign language that du Bouchet considered he did not know well. Conversely, Jaccottet and du Bouchet are usually viewed in similar terms, as poets of the natural world and the impersonal poetic subject. It is in Jaccottet's text, moreover, that we note the greatest sense of loss. In those by du Bouchet and Bonnefoy, otherness, or strangeness, paradoxically brings the lost person closer to the writer. Mourning is discussed in contemporary theoretical works as a realization of absence; the specter of loss haunts texts and shows presence to be an illusion. In this paper, I shall consider how these texts by Bonnefoy and du Bouchet work to nuance that conclusion. Mourning Presence Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia has been questioned in recent work. Freud argues that mourning that is not successfully completed leads to melancholia, in which the subject is unable to detach him- or herself from the person s/he has lost and is therefore caught in a fixed attachment to an absent person. (5) Derrida considers whether successful mourning is possible or even desirable. (6) He refuses discussion of whether someone who was present can be successfully accepted as absent, because he insists that people are never present to one another in the first place. In Memoires: pour Paul de Man he writes that the other might only fully come to us as other after his or her death, through the experience of mourning. (7) The subject of mourning is especially pertinent to Derrida's later work, including his tributes to friends published as The Work of Mourning. (8) In their introduction to this volume, the editors stress that, for Derrida, loss was inherent in friendship; friends always know that one of them is bound to lose the other (1). They also discuss his dilemma over whether, and how much, to quote his friends' own words in these addresses. Derrida writes in his piece on Roland Barthes: Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand, not to say anything that comes back to oneself, to one's own voice, to remain silent, or at the very least to let oneself be accompanied or preceded in counterpoint by the friend's voice. …

Nostalgia of the Everyday: Earthly Things as Poetic Criteria in Weil and Jacottet

Simone Weil had a life-long interest in poetry and, especially in the wake of her trip to Italy in 1937, a passionate interest in fine art. Her entire way of thinking is marked by a sensitivity to the instance of the beautiful, yet scholarly attention to the implications of her thought for poetry and aesthetics has been belated. (1) In this article, I undertake to begin working out the implications of one particular strand of her thought for modern poetry: Weil's attention to the status of as or bridges, in human perception and experience. My point of comparison will be the work of the Swiss-French poet Philippe Jaccottet. first part of the article is dedicated to Well's concept of metaxu and its particular relevance to works of art, while the second part uses Jaccottet's writings to elicit Weil's continuing relevance. In the First and Last Notebooks, first published in French as La connaissance surnaturelle, Weil makes the arresting statement that are the criterion of spiritual things (147). That earthly are the criterion of spiritual means that earthly are portals of the spirit--or, in the Greek Weil used metaxu, bridges--just as the body is to the soul. If there is a transcendent dimension to being, will only show itself in the way we treat earthly things. Weil's text continues: This is what we generally don't want to recognize, because we are frightened of a criterion. virtue of anything is manifested outside the thing. If, on the pretext that only spiritual are of value, we refuse to take the light thrown on earthly as a criterion, we are in danger of having a non-existent treasure. (FLN 147) Irremediably transient, the sensible world has at best an intermediary status. Yet the transcendent world, if exists, is known only indirectly through the reflection casts on the world below. Weil writes, The object of my search is not the supernatural, but this world. supernatural is the light. We must not presume to make an object of it, or else we degrade it (Notebooks 173). Earthly are thus bridges in a more than transitional sense. They are pure criteria that measure us by the use we make of them. From the outset, Weil's thinking brings to the fore an ambiguity that inheres in the nature of metaxis, though an ambiguity that lies in the nature of the thing and not in her thinking. On one hand, no object is an end in itself. If becomes an end in itself, then has been made the object of unregulated desire or idolatry. On the other hand, making the right use of earthly means lending to them a certain limited finality. This is most evident in the case of works of art. If metaphysics is proven on the material and transient, poetry for its part raises the transient up to the permanent. In a late conversational text titled Philosophy, Weil makes this point with her usual penetration: Man cannot get over regretting that he has not been given the infinite, and he has more than one way of fabricating, with the finite, an equivalent of the infinite for himself--which is perhaps the definition of (Formative Writings 284). (2) We treat works of art as singular objects serving no end beyond themselves, and yet, at the same time, we never entirely escape the sense that what compels attention in the work of art is the promise of something left unmanifest. We stay with it, we are reluctant to leave it, and yet this reluctance is the function of a desire kindled by the work for something that the work does not contain. In this sense, works of art are a limited instance of what is true of objects in general: insofar as they manifest the beautiful we wish to stay with them, while at the same time they are points of transit. work of art thus features a contradictoriness inherent in earthly life: transient, nevertheless solicits attachment; vulnerable, nevertheless gives a glimpse of the permanent. …

The "Tender Gesture" of Georges Perros and the Lessons of Contemporary French Poetry

ince upon a time, American (and British and Irish) poets read French poetry in the original; or at least desired to do so, even if they could not really understand the language. Or am I wrong? In any case, such was one linguistic and poetic duty passed on-the debts and borrowings go back to Chaucer-by Pound and Eliot, however quaint some of their likes and dislikes seem today. These two modernists and several other expatriates, as well as others who stayed at home, enjoyed this profitable partnership, the Anglo-Americans taking both poetic forms and encouragement (with respect to certain kinds of subject matter) from the French, and-a little less often-vice versa. This being said, I have the impression that a gulf between American and French poetry has opened, indeed widened considerably over the past three or four decades-especially from the American standpoint. An American poet might peruse a translated volume or two by Yves Bonnefoy or Philippe Jaccottet (and let us hope that curious readers have unearthed the recent British version of Jacques Reda' s invigorating Les Ruines de Paris, or a much earlier American rendering of Jacques Roubaud's poignant Quelque chose noir), but it is doubtful that Americans who are not also book-sleuths and avid journal-browsers have even heard of Andre du Bouchet, Lorand Gaspar, Charles Juliet, Silvia Baron Supervielle, or

Philippe Jaccottet, une écriture de l'événement : « Le passage »

Philippe Jaccottet, or Writing the Event : « the Passage » Jaccottet uses the term « passage » to describe the event his poetry is about : a transcendental encounter with the world which leads to its transcription — or translation — with the objective of giving the reader, in its own passing, light, or joy.

Allegories of Temporality: Philippe Jaccottet and the Poetics of the Notebook

Without hesitation, critics of contemporary French poetry have placed Philippe Jaccottet squarely in the tradition of German Romanticism. According to Jean-Claude Mathieu, Jaccottet prolongs Romanticism (100) while for Peter Low, Jaccottet's elegiac tone and his nostalgia for a lost plenitude are H61derlin revisited (61). The poet himself foregrounds the Germanic influences on his work, citing Novalis, for instance, when he evokes the poetic function in La Promenade sous les arbres: Le Paradis est dispers6 sur toute la terre, c'est pourquoi nous ne le reconnaissons plus. II faut reunir ses traits epars (28). For most critics, this last quote has served as a kind of unofficial poetics for Jaccottet's project as a whole, one that defines writing as a gathering together of a disseminated unity. It is not surprising that Jaccottet would be identified as a neo-Romantic, or that he would be linked to a tradition that posits the poet as self-present visionary, scribe of the a-temporal transcendent insaisissable.' What is surprising, however, is that contemporary critics would neglect to search for the kind of disruptive ironies and subversive dismantlings of the self-present subject that have recently been located in the works of Jaccottet's predecessors, Rousseau, H6lderlin and Goethe. Critical assessments that neglect to problematize Jaccottet's explicit celebrations of unity treat only one moment in a dialectical poetics.2 Such assessments obscure a crucial, perhaps the crucial aspect of Jaccottet's work, absenting him from critical discussions that

Reorientating Lyric: Philippe Jaccottet's and Guillevic's Transformations of Haiku Aesthetics in Airs and Du Domaine

Reorientating Lyric: Philippe Jaccottet's and Guillevic's Transformations of Haiku Aesthetics in <i>Airs</i> and <i>Du Domaine</i>

An infinity of flashing briefness: The poetics of Yves Bonnefoy

From the publication in 1953 of his first major collection of poetry, Du mouvement et de I’immobilith de Douve, Yves Bonnefoy has exercised a fascination and influence in the realm of French letters that, having steadily grown, may now be said to have reached their point of full blossoming. His importance in the history of modern French literature is manifestly assured and may well be deemed ultimately even greater than those involved in the 1983 collogue de Cerisy devoted to his work clearly already think. Author of fine translations of Shakespeare, eloquent and profound writings on the history and nature of art and poetry, Bonnefoy has allowed his thought and art to develop away from the strict confines of literary schools and even broad contemporary intellectual trends, and rather in loose, though intimate contact with powerful and solitary voices of both the past Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Jouve, for example and his own time: Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet, Andre Frenaud, Andre du Bouchet and others. His achievements in the realm of art criticism are, similarly, largely those of an inspired autodidact, and his recent appointment to the College de France bears witness not only to the brilliance of his enterprise but also to its dogged individuality. My aim here is to map the principal features of a poetics that has guided Bonnefoy both in his criticism and his creative writing from the earliest poetic utterances of Anti-Platon and even the Trait& du pianiste, down through Du mouvement et de I’immobilitk de Douve and the determining proses of L’Improbable and Un R&e fait h Mantoue, to the essays of Le Nuage rouge, the sweeping, slow majesty of Dans le leurre du seuil, and the brief but compelling poems of L’Origine du langage. Whilst a good deal of material cannot be touched upon, the general rigour and constancy of Bonnefoy’s poetics will in this way come clearly into focus, as will also the complexity and multi-facetted nature of his thinking and approach. We shall thus have occasion to deal with aspects of Bonnefoy’s poetics such as the distinction between presence and concept, the significance of death, ephemeralness and imperfection, hope and love, withdrawal and assent, language considered as problem and solution, and so on. Our final appreciation will reveal a poet working, both through the articulation of his poetics and his poetic praxis, at the intersection of the infinite and the briefest of illuminations. The very early texts of Anti-Platen, dating back to 1947, still retain something of that air of enigma and obscurity that Bonnefoy himself is troubled to dispel in his reading, twenty years after their initial appearance,