Strolling out from the Self — Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008

Yet with these and other additions, such as Réda’s ebullient mentor C. A. Cingria (1883-1954), whom Romer mentions, this already generous bilingual selection (filling out nearly three hundred pages of text) would have grown beyond measure. What is essential is that Feldman and Romer, as they provide samples of each poet’s prose and poetry, have pinpointed a mouvance that extends over three generations and promises to continue. Furthermore, the anthologists show that such groupings offer a more accurate way of appraising literary history: a national literary history considered not as a chronologically linear succession of movements, a viewpoint presupposing the dubious notion of “progression,” but rather as a network of elective affinities. In this case, influential models can be writers working well before Follain’s literary coming of age — the anthology includes an excerpt from his touching memoir, L’Épicerie de l’enfance (Fata Morgana, 1938) — and involve seminal foreign authors as well.

In fact, although the common lineage that is delineated makes this anthology a precious and even provocative contribution to French literary history, the individual literary lineages of each poet reveal great diversity. Goffette, whose admiration for Verlaine is well-known, pays homage to Giacomo Leopardi and Cesare Pavese. De Roux bases prose texts on Jules Renard, an ironic scrutinizer of the quotidian. Jaccottet is nourished by Rilke and Hölderlin, as well as by Oriental poets. Thomas was deeply read in English and American literature. In his recent Battement (Fata Morgana, 2009), Réda — the most eclectic and free-spirited of the group — once again reveals his metaphysical penchant, as well as his humor, by self-portraying himself as “A Pre-Socratic Philosopher in Meurthe-et-Moselle.” At the same time, Réda has simultaneously published a complimentary book of prose and poetry, Battues (Fata Morgana, 2009), and an astonishing volume, La Physique amusante (Gallimard, 2009), of rhyming, metered, eighteenth-century-like “didactic” long poems each based on theories and findings in contemporary physics. His delightful volume of travel poems and prose narratives, Europes (Host Publications, 2009), has likewise appeared in Aaron Prevots’ translation. Tellingly, these poets and prose poets — the two categories simultaneously applying to all seven figures — have sometimes learned from and stimulated each other. Lifelong friendships have formed, as Romer explains. A melancholy printed testimony is Goffette’s Tombeau du Capricorne (Gallimard, 2009), a poetic eulogy for de Roux, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

These “fiercely independent” poets — a quality that Romer also stresses — represent an engaging kind of French writing too often overlooked abroad, partly because of the widespread notion that contemporary French poetry must necessarily be abstract, hermetic, narcissistic, and indigestible. In bold contrast, these seven poets relish daily life, observe nature closely, and occasionally evoke erotic attraction, as in Follain’s sketch cited above. Goffette especially explores the latter theme, most recently in his series of prose reveries and phantasms, Presqu’elles (Gallimard, 2009). To return to the anthology, note the subtlety with which he passes, in “At Dusk, 2,” from the vision of a brothel to a meditation on child- and adulthood:

The house with the red lamp in the blind alley
and you waiting to grow up, heart
and fingers stained with ink
from searching the place for roses
Now that a four-lane highway crosses it
you too, unawares, have taken your place
in the line that distances the horizon
where the child that couldn’t grow calls to you
day after day his dark hands bringing
to the sky’s rim the red bouquet
you never picked.

— p. 247

These poets have all mastered classical prosody and some of them even dare to use the traditional alexandrine. In her own excellent introduction, Feldman provides insights into the difficulties involved in bringing such French into English. (Although at first singly concentrating on certain poets or pieces, Feldman and Romer ended up working together as a duo.) The refined formal structures of many of these poems and prose texts hardly mean, however, that their authors are traditionalists turned toward the past. They all have sharp eyes for telltale present detail, which include natural phenomena grasped in their ever-renewable freshness. This is Jaccottet’s domain par excellence. “Walking by the meadow today heartens me, cheers me,” he reports for instance in a prose piece selected from Paysages avec figures absentes. “It’s full of poppies in among the wild grasses. Red, red! It’s not fire, certainly not blood. Much too cheerful, too slight for that.”

Rhyme and regular meters give some of the writers, notably Thomas, Goffette and Réda, a lyricism that is missing in the work of many of their contemporaries. Even the more subdued Follain, Jaccottet, Ortleib or de Roux have a recognizable musicality. Finally, their originality often stems from how they depict the self in their poems and narratives. As for all of us, the self has enabled them to stroll forward into the world, and then to sense, to think, to daydream. But rarely do these poets remain introspective very long. The Cartesian cogito ergo sum founds self-awareness, but they prefer gazing outwards. The heightening quality of many pieces rendered so carefully and gracefully by Feldman and Romer is that the self withdraws, leaving the world in its stead. The last word can be given to Thomas:

Vain rampart
of the self
when you crumble
it feels so good
in the light

— p. 105

Page 2 of 2 1 2 View All

Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com

Permalink URL: https://www.cerisepress.com/02/04/strolling-out-from-the-self-into-the-deep-street-seven-modern-french-poets-1938-2008

Page 2 of 2 was printed. Select View All pagination to print all pages.