Oldal 68 [68]
LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING
The English translation of the French meaning would be “beach of the worlds,”
that of the German: “plague of the moon.” With this text the poet tried to join
the words with a syntactic junction, achieving a complexity above the simple
juxtaposition of two words.
Jouet considers himself a beginner as a German poet. The forms he uses are
typical to his earlier French poetical production. While the homonyms still
present an attachment to the French language, the two other forms are rather
“easy.” The “monostique paysager” (landscape monostich) is a form invented
by Jouet: its principle is to describe the view opened to the eyes of the poetic
I in a single line, moving the head from left to right, and describing the sight,
as the letters and words of the Latin alphabet are following each other in the
languages using it. Obviously, this genre does not demand a very complicated
syntax; rather elementary language skills may be enough for composing in it,
and it cannot be longer than a single line.
The grammatical complexity of the third genre, “elementary morality,” is
even more reduced, just like a skeleton of a complex text even in the first,
French specimens of the genre: most of the lines are composed of two—word
groups, including a noun and an adjective.’° This genre was invented by Ray¬
mond Queneau. Jacques Jouet excels in it; he even coedited a poetical anthol¬
ogy of the genre, popular in the circle of the Oulipo."
Of course, not every German poem written by Jouet belongs to these genres:
Some others have rhyming verses, more complicated sentences, sometimes
with grammatical faults. A new level in the diversification of Jouet’s German
compositions is attained when he becomes capable of writing short narrative
or elegiac poems with whole sentences. The highly elaborated grammatical
structure of a poem, of course, is not at all parallel with or guarantee of its
poetical quality. One—word poems might be as good as longer ones. Needless
to say: a long novel will never be a wonderful poem. But the apparition of these
longer compositions among the daily poems documents Jouet’s progress in
learning German.
In the published interview Jouet said that his primary constraint of compos¬
ing the daily poems is observed in any case: he is not allowed to correct the
poem the day after, even if it has some grammatical mistakes. That is how this
collection of poems also becomes a memento and a diary of his exploration of
10 For the definition of the genre, see Raymond Queneau, Morale élémentaire, OULIPO, ouvroir
de littérature potentielle, https://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/morale-elementaire accessed 27
October 2022; and also Jacques Roubaud’s study “The birth of a form: elementary morality”,
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 22 September 1997, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/
The+birth+of+a+form%3A+elementary+morality-a020640716, accessed 27 October 2022
1 Jacques Jouet — Pierre Martin - Dominique Moncond’huy (eds.): La morale élémentaire:
aventure d’une forme poétique, Queneau, Oulipo, etc., Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes,
2007.
+ 66 +