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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 Raymond Queneau. Jacques Jouet excels in it; he even coedited a poetical anthology 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 composing 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 +
