Oldal 67 [67]
“UM MICH NEU ZU MACHEN”
in October 2022 by myself." The corpus is not available yet online, and the
author does not intend to make it accessible to everyone. Of course, as every
poem has been sent to a single person, in theory at least the recipient knows
the poem he got. But as a whole collection of poems, it cannot be read yet
without Jouet’s consent.
Long before beginning to compose his daily poems in German, Jouet had
already acquired a level of German. But he is aware of his limited language
skills compared to his native French. After his switch he is constantly trying
to improve them by consuming and writing poetry. The training necessary for
the poetical composition consists mostly in reading in German and learning
German poems by heart. In the interview with Libération, he said: “...Because
I write before knowing German. My idea is to prove that one can learn a lan¬
guage by reading, translating, memorizing, and writing poetry. This is to reverse
the values received from a language by focusing everything on the poetry.”’
The daily poems contain several texts belonging to genres which are im¬
portant for Jouet’s French poetry as well. Three of them have various advan¬
tages for the poet who is still learning the language he wants to explore and
practice on a long term: 1) the homonymic poems, 2) the “monostique pay¬
sager”, and 3) the “elementary morality.” It is important to add that the special
layout of the three genres allows them to be classified also as visual poetry.°
The first genre consists of one, two or three words, all homonyms of French
and German: lexical elements that have a meaning both in French and in Ger¬
man, but not the same. As a subtitle always indicates: ,,zweisprachiges Gedicht
oder Gedicht mit nur einem Wort, aber sie sind zwei” (“bilingual poem, or a
poem with only one word, which is in fact two”)—in case of poems of two words.’
These are not loanwords in any case: the correspondence of the form is al¬
ways accidental, not etymological. Precisely, the poetical effect is obtained by
the great semantic distance between the two meanings. Jouet’s first four Ger¬
man poems belong to this category: DONNER; SEIN; HAUT; PATIN. Later
this practice was extended to pairs of words, even going to combine three
words. For instance, the poem written on 6 October is the following:
PLAGE DES MONDES.
a
This interview has not been published and might never be. The author answered my questions
by email.
English translation is mine. Cf. “.. Car j'écris avant de savoir l'allemand. Mon idée, c’est de
prouver qu’on peut apprendre une langue en lisant, en traduisant, en apprenant par coeur et
en écrivant des poèmes. C’est inverser les valeurs reçues d’une langue en centrant tout sur la
poésie.” Guillaume Lecaplain, Jacques Jouet.
The poems are written with a special color, and sometimes one of the meanings may explain
the selection of a specific color, like in the case of MAIS (meaning “but” as a French, but “corn”
as a German word).
The subtitle might slightly change if the poem has more than one word in it.
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