Oldal 66 [66]
OCR
LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING poem to every person living in the world. Four authors, Patrick Biau, Jean—Paul Honoré, Natali Leduc and Cécile Riou, so far have joined Jacques Jouet in this enterprise. Instead of some platform of the social media, the poems are sent by post in an ordinary envelope. This is a very conservative avant-garde initiative: a voluntary, deeply reflected refusal of the digital technologies, and a sentimental return to an obsolescent medium, symbol of a direct, more personal relationship via and for the poetry even though most of the recipients have never met the author. The poem sent by post is a kind of present, and this present is unique for every recipient. His new career as a German writer began with changing the language of his daily poems from French to German. Describing his switch to German, Jouet speaks about his practice of “rupture,” taking radical decisions in his career, and of his will “to decenter himself.” In an interview by Guillaume Lecaplain published in Libération, he says that he decided on this radical change close to the 30" anniversary of his practice of writing a poem every day.‘ And his first German poem was written precisely on that day. It is conceived by him to renew, to reinitiate his poetry in a totally different linguistic and literary environment. In his poem composed on 30 May, he thematizes this switch and describes his goal: “Um mich neu zu machen” (“To renew myself”). Jouet is in fact the second German-writing poet of the Oulipo after Oskar Pastior (1927-2006). Pastior was coopted as a member of the group in 1992. Born in Romania, imprisoned in a Russian detention camp, he had a—more or less—deep knowledge of English, Italian, Romanian, French and Russian, so beside writing in German he experimented with multilingualism in many of his compositions. Jouet explained that he was and is influenced by Pastior’s work, and his ingenious use of the German and the other aforementioned languages. The author made his German poems written between 1 April and 31 August in 2022 available to me: his “poèmes du jour”, some 160 poems, at least one per day. This is, of course, not an organized, arranged, longtime meditated songbook in the Petrarchan tradition. It is much more a highly interesting documentation of the authors gradual discovery of the poetical possibilities offered by the German language. He also shared with me a small cycle of poems entitled Zwei Flüße, composed in August. In this essay, I would like to present this corpus, the process of code-switching in Jouet’s German poetry, tracing its evolution and changes so far, comparing it to his prior, French works. Commenting on the poems, I will also present Jouet’s poetical remarks as they appear in a recent interview published in Libération, and another one made 5 Guillaume Lecaplain interview: Jacques Jouet: ‘Ceux qui m’aiment apprendront l’allemand’, in Libération https://www.liberation.fr/culture/livres/jacques-jouet-ceux-qui-maiment-apprendront-lallemand-20221001_4NR4RSLWHVCM3P5H3KWEBXYARA/, accessed 27 October 2022. +64 »
