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OCR
LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING ohne korrigieren! absolut nichts! der Fehler ist der Stil ich bin kein deutscher Dichter, kein mehr französischer Dichter ich bin ein lernender Dichter, ein Anfanger [...] (Without correcting! Absolutely nothing! The fault is the style Iam not a German poet, nor a French poet anymore I am a poet who learns, a beginner [...])'* Beside the continuous writing of the daily poems, at least one other cycle of 25 poems was prepared by Jouet between August 1 and 25, one for each day. This independent series entitled Zwei FliifSe is dedicated to the inhabitants of the French village Duesme, and the German Furthwangen, where respectively the Seine and the Danube take their origin. These texts have the most difficult prosodic structure in the corpus I am aware of. Written in several quatrains, rhyming xaxa, they follow the form of Heine’s world—famous Loreley, aromantic ballad on the river Rhine. The precise and self-confident handling of a genuine German poetic form, the exploration of the intertextual and interformal dialogue between the two texts might also be considered as a progress, a further stage of “learning how to be” a German poet. Writing in such a form in French might not be interesting for Jouet: too easy, too simple, somewhat archaic. But as he qualifies himself as a beginner in German poetry, there is no shame in experimenting also this form. CONCLUSION It is impossible to prognosticate the further evolution in Jacques Jouet’s poetry. But this short presentation of the first months of his work allows us to see some tendencies and consequences of the language change. First: he has invented new poetical genres: that of the homonymous word—poem, bilingual by nature, and the Kriminalgedicht or Banditgedicht, which is language-independent. Second: he keeps some of his favorite French poetic forms also in the new language, like the “elementary morality” or the “poéme de métro.” Third: this overview shows the progress of the author in German, and the complexification of his texts’ grammatical structure. He first acquires the words, then the skill to compose adjective phrases sufficient for writing elementary moralities, then sentences, and only after that the necessary skills to write rhyming poems. But even without knowing the future, we can certainly say this 4 English translation is mine. +68 +
