foudebassan | French poetry 101

And this, dear friends, should be the last of the poetry posts.

Andrée Chedid is born in Cairo in 1920, in a Lebano-Egyptian family. She studies in French, English and Arabic, and comes to live in France in 1946. Her serious poems are about the East and its influence in the West, but today’s poem is of the less serious kind.

Pavane de la virgule

« Quant à Moi ! », dit la Virgule,
J'articule et je module ;
Minuscule ; mais je régule
Les mots qui s'emportaient !

J'ai la forme d'une Péninsule ;
A mon signe la phrase bascule.
Avec grâce je granule
Le moindre petit opuscule.

Quant au Point !
Cette tête de mule
Qui se prétend mon cousin !

Voyez comme il se coagule,
On dirait une pustule,
Au mieux : un grain de sarrasin.

(Pavane of the comma

"As for me!" says the comma,
I articulate and I modulate
I am tiny; but I regulate
The words that were storming away!

I have the shape of a peninsula;
At my cue the sentence tips over.
With grace I granulate
The least of small opuscules.

As for the colon!
This jenny
Who pretends to be my cousin!

Look how it coagulates,
It looks like a pustule,
Or better: a buckwheat seed.)

The poem’s charm (apart for the fun it pokes at punctuation in general and punctuation fans in peculiar) is in the assonances and alliterations (= repeating of the same vowels and consonants without being rimes). It is not a traditional French form, the classics tend to work more with numbers of syllables and conventional rimes, but it does have something to it, does it not?

The “grain de sarrasin”, is, literally, a buckwheat seed, but a “Sarrasin” is a Saracen, and “to put a grain of something” means adding a little touch of something.

I cannot resist adding a bonus poem. I don’t feel up to translating it as it’s about accents (the funny signs we put up some vowels) and I don’t know how that could be rendered in English. But the French speakers should enjoy.

Éloge de l'accent

Aigu
Grave
Ou circonflexe
Avec zèle
J'annexe
Par kyrielles
Les voyelles !

A E I O U, mes belles !
Je vous suis providentiel !

Je vous coiffe à tire-d'aile
Je vous gèle
Je vous flagelle
Je vous grêle
Je vous ombrelle !

U O I E A, Agnelles!
Rendez-vous à mes appels !

Aigu
Grave
Ou circonflexe
Je le répète sans complexe :
C'est l'Accent
Qui fait le Texte !

(Note the allusion to Rimbaud’s Voyelles)

I’ll put up one last post to round it all up and add some technical precisions, but we’re essentially finished.

If you enjoyed this series, the best way to show your appreciation would be to do the same for your own national poetry… *nudges

dacian_goddess and looks enquiringly to the rest of the audience…* or of course to do a French poetry 102! If you’re not on my f-list, please let me know, I’d love to read along.