Oldal 65 [65]
OCR
"UM MICH NEU ZU MACHEN" Switching the Language of Poetry by Jacgues Jouet ——o— LEVENTE SELÁF Very recently, by an act that surprised the entire French literary public interested in poetry, the well-known French author Jacgues Jouet (1947), member of the Oulipo, took the drastic decision to give up publishing poetry in his French mother tongue and switch to German. After writing an important oeuvre in French, including a dozen novels and books of poetry, widely read all over the French-speaking world, and also known in English translations, his decision came very abruptly in Spring 2022, at the age of 74. Since 1983, his entry to the Oulipo, Jouet was a prolific author. He invented several poetical constraints, and most of his poems were composed in an Oulipian spirit, following (complex) formal rules. While his elder colleague and co-member, the poet and former mathematician Jacgues Roubaud is obsessed by numbers and all poetical devices based on them, the new poetic forms invented by Jouet seem to reflect a major interest in time and space: for instance the “monostiques paysagers,”! and the “chronopoèmes,” poems whose length is calculated in advance with the time necessary to their reading out, controlled with the help of a chronometer,? etc. His self-constraining practice of “poèmes du jour” (daily poems) is also related to his attachment to time as a major motif, or a principle of poetical creation: 1‘ April 1992 Jouet decided to compose at least one poem per day, and he has continued to do so since then without interruption; a good part of these “daily poems” have been published in several volumes. Some 21 years later, 29 May 2013, Jouet launched another initiative, the “ppp”—projet poétique planétaire.“ It consists of sending his daily poems day after day to a single person. The final goal of this radical initiative is to offer a 1 Jacques Jouet: Monostique paysager, https://www.oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/monostique-paysager, accessed 27 October, 2022. 2 Jacques Jouet: Chronopoéme, https://www.oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/chronopoeme, accessed 27 October, 2022. 3 Three volumes have been published so far: Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux, Paris, P.O.L., 1998; Du jour, Paris, P.O.L., 2013; Dos, pensée (poème), revenant, Paris, P.O.L., 2019. On this genre as a specific constraint see Jacques Jouet: PPP, le poème adressé du jour, https://www.oulipo.net/ fr/ppp-le-poeme-adresse-du-jour, accessed 27 October, 2022. * For a concise description of the project see the article “Projet poétique planétaire” in Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet_po%C3%A9tique_plan%C3%A9taire, accessed 27 October 2022. +63 +
