French poetry 101 – Jacques Prévert

[foudebassan]

Jacques Prévert is born in 1900 in a middle-class family. He’s bored at school and quits aged 15 for a series of odd jobs, interrupted by the war – he’s mobilised in 1918. He wanders around in Dadaist and surrealist circles, but only from afar (he was mostly there for the drinking and consumption of illegal substances). His first book is published in 1946.



Le Cancre

Il dit non avec la tête
mais il dit oui avec le coeur
il dit oui à ce qu'il aime
il dit non au professeur
il est debout
on le questionne
et tous les problèmes sont posés
soudain le fou rire le prend
et il efface tout
les chiffres et les mots
les dates et les noms
les phrases et les pièges
et malgré les menaces du maître
sous les huées des enfants prodiges
avec les craies de toutes les couleurs
sur le tableau noir du malheur
il dessine le visage du bonheur


(The Dunce

He says no with his head
but he says yes with the heart
he says yes to what he loves
he says no to the professor
he stands
he is questioned
and all the problems are laid
suddenly he starts giggling
and he erases everything
the figures and the names
the sentences and the traps
and despite the master's threats
under the child prodigies' boos
with chalks of every colour
on the blackboard of unhappiness
he draws the face of happiness)

As you can see, both the structure and the vocabulary are very simple, not to say simplistic. Prévert works with word association and ‘calembours’ (jokes deriving from the mis-using of a word), which gets him elected as president of the Pataphysic college in 1953. He dies in 1977 of a lung cancer after decades of heavy smoking.

The Collège de Pataphysique is an officious organism founded in 1948 (it owes its name, and most of its general inspiration, to Alfred Jarry, a turn-of-the-century playwright). It is erudite, yet irreverent, and its sole aim is to play with language, to explore all its possibilities – always with humour. Its 1950 president, Raymond Queneau, excels at it; a member of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle – workroom of potential literature), he is best-known for his “Exercices de styles”, a short book where he tells the same anecdote in 100 very different ways. Queneau also wrote the ultimate sonnet – a classic sonnet where each verse can be changed for 9 other possibilities. The result is “Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes”, One hundred thousand billion poems – if one were to read each and every one of the possible sonnets, facturing in 15 seconds to turn each page and 8 daily hours to get some sleep, one would need a full 200 years. All the different verses were published on the net 10 years ago, but there was a big-name legal case about it, and since then no one has dared do it again (pity).



We’re slowly but surely reaching the end. Tomorrow, the shark and the seagull.

Comments

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this poem (unlike nearly every other poem in the book) didn't inspire my 17-year-old self enough even to draw flying pigs all over it, let alone scribble notes in all the margins - although I did have a few dutiful remarks about Prévert making fun of maths, literature, and adults generally. Rather a pity, that. I was hoping for the kind of brilliantly-insightful-yet-amazingly-obtuse notations that characterise my English literature notes from that year. Painfully funny, in places. Ah well.

I seem to have preferred "Barbara" and "À la pêche à la baleine".

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

I was a very serious, intellectual student and absolutely never amused myself with drawing flying pigs.

*halo*

There are lots of improvised "morpion" grids over most of my notes, though (you know, the game where you need three crosses or three rounds in a row to win)

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Noughts and crosses is the inspired English name for this game.

I used to play 'Connect Four' (which is pretty much the same, but with a much bigger grid and requiring to be built up from the bottom) in my French classes.

Flying pigs originated in German class, but then spread, and develeoped all sorts of flying apparatuses, musical instruments, etc...

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

May one inquire as to the possible causal link between learning German and drawing pigs?

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure that there was one, actually, although I do distinctly remember choosing German as a subject specifically because the classroom had a kitchen and they used to have wurst at the end of term... The pigs might have been related to the wurst. Or, given my German teacher's propensity for dreadful bilingual puns, they might have been inspired by something he said. I do know that they are all over EVERYTHING for a period of about three years.

(the Indonesian classroom also had a kitchen, but I didn't like Indonesian food as much)

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Well, at least that's an original reason to chose a language over another!

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

French, of course, had patisserie - but since I was already studying French, I was always going to continue with that.

Actually, I think the food aspect was a pretty common reason for language choices at that particular school!

(I seem to remember we made crepes or fondue or something involving brandy in a later french class. Chocolate mousse, maybe? What I mostly remember is one of the more annoying students drinking the rest of the bottle and getting drunk, to the utter fury of our teacher)

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Eeek, I sympathise with the teacher!

I must make for lively class reunion discussions though.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Oh, so do I. I did at the time, even. It could have got the teacher into a lot of trouble, given the laws about drinking ages in Australia (not that anyone pays much attention to them, in my experience).

I've never actually been to a school reunion - largely, I think, because I'm still friends with most of the people I liked at high school...

Catherine