Anthologist: Nestoras Poulakos
Preface: Christos Nikou
Translator: Androniki Dimitriadou
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Stéphane Korvin, Aurélia Lassaque, François-Xavier Maigre, Adeline Baldacchino, Victor Blanc, Jean-Baptiste Pedini, Lysiane Rakotoson, Benoît Reiss
Find the book here
The lecture Odysseus Elytis gave at the Nobel Prize ceremony in the Royal Swedish Academy, on the 8th of December, 1979, is without a doubt a manifesto for the role and function of poetry, an act of faith in this form of art. In The Little Mariner (“Anoint the Ariston [X]), six years later, he added: “Whatever I was able to acquire in my life, by way of acts visible to all, that is, to win my own transparence, I owe to a kind of special courage Poetry gave me: to be wind for the kite, and kite for the wind, even when the sky is missing”. One might ask, however, what links these two extracts from Elytis’s work to this bilingual Anthology of Young French Poets. Our reply would be: they are deeply linked, if we bring to mind a quotation from Jean-Pierre Siméon, French poet and author of the essay “La poésie sauvera le monde” (Poetry will save the world), that states that “poetry is somewhat the Esperanto of the human soul”. Could it be that people are no longer moved by this Esperanto? Is it possible that they have quitted trying to explain their own existence? Perhaps it would be better to ask this question differently: can we talk of poetry in these times, where values have crumbled and the Internet often (but not always) diversifies not only poetry as a form of art, but the entire literary creation? In this context, what place does poetry hold in 21st-century France? In what direction is French poetry headed, based on the present output of young French poets? This Anthology of Young French Poets is an attempt to address and answer these questions.
The excellent choice of Vakxikon Publications to become systematically involved with contemporary foreign poetry, instead of the just the classics, cannot be stressed enough; it becomes even more important if we consider that through these young poetic voices, we are given the opportunity to track, in the present instance, the dynamics of a generation of French poets, whose compositions – which seem contrasting, at least at first –, despite the fact that they arise from different states of mind and, not unexpectedly, feature a wide range of styles, are actually parts of a whole. In many ways, this Anthology of Young French Poets draws a map of the landscape of contemporary French poetry in all its aspects.
There are eight poets of both genders included in this compilation, all of them born in France between 1976 and 1992. This means that, at least according to their chronology and age, they all belong to the same generation (the youngest of them, Victor Blanc, is an exception, because he was born in 1992). Nevertheless, they all prove to be outside the generation of the so-called Millenials, or Génération Y, which is the relevant term in French. That is not to say that they don’t share at least few common characteristics of this generation (such as, for example, the use of technology, although they mostly view technology as a medium for communicating and publicizing their work), but that they artfully transform their own reality into a poetic corpus (say, a walk around Paris or an event). As Jean-Piérre Simeon said, “poets always try to translate that other world into this world”. With verses laden with emotions, memories, impressions, sensations, strong descriptions, vivid and dreamlike images, the poetry of this young generation – collected in this anthology and comprising the fine fleur of French poetic production – seeks more than merely to interpret this other world, the world of dreams; it also aims to decode the actual world, the modern world, the everyday life and reality in all its up-to-date wholeness. In this context, not only do these poets render all the above aspects in a poetic manner and with insightful sensibility, they also use poetry to communicate and seek the true meaning of the mystery of life and poetry, which are inextricably linked to one another. Their poems ardently express an exquisite everyday life and reality full of pain, hardship, love, joy, in which poetry comes to poets, instead of the other way around (as François-Xavier Maigre puts it: “There are many paths leading to you / tiny is the age of man / and I walk”, p.53). However, they don’t merely invoke elements, situations and things from 21st-century daily life; they often employ biblical and ancient/mythological elements (see Aurelia Lassaque’s Odysseus and Victor Blanc’s Salome). This, however, is not a mere mimicry of traditional or other poetic forms, despite the fact that we sometimes come upon several fleeting references or elective affinities, which are either pointed out by the poets themselves (in a header, or an interview etc.) or otherwise outlined by the aura of the poem itself (e.g. Gérard de Nerval and Jean Cassou in Adeline Baldacchino, Apollinaire in Victor Blanc, Rimbaud in François-Xavier Maigre). Poetry is timeless and ceaseless, and poets incorporate these qualities within their own here and now. Moreover, poetry, being a living organism, and according to what intertextuality has taught us, is capable of artfully intermingling with all periods in time.
Before we proceed to a short mention of each separate poet featured this Anthology, in order to become a bit more familiar with their poetic universes (at least to the best possible extent, since their poetry is constantly evolving), we should refer to three structural elements found in their poetry: the peritext, a term coined by Gérard Genette in his book “Seuils” (published in English as “Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation”), punctuation and blank spaces, which play a major role, and finally the interaction of poetry with visual arts (see, for example, Stéphane Korvin’s affinity for photography and Victor Blanc’s love for painting, in the general sense of the genre), theatre or song (for example, in the cases of Aurelia Lassaque and Lysiane Rakotoson).
The peritext, along with the epitext and the paratext, make up the information around the text (title, subheading, preface, dedication, header / motto, notes, cover, pictures or paintings, etc.), which allows us to formulate an initial interpretative approach. In several published poetry books – there are poems that haven’t yet been published or belong to books pending publication – there are prefaces written by authors for the purpose of presenting the compilation and its characteristics to the readers (for example, Franck Delorieux has written a preface for Victor Blanc’s book and Mariette Navarro wrote an introduction for Lysiane Rakotoson’s collection of poems; both provided a basic outline of the poetry and style of the books), dedications to their loved ones (Jean-Baptiste Pedini dedicates two of his poems, “To Gaspar” and “To Arthur”, to his children) or to persons who have passed away (such as the grandmother and the father of Adeline Baldacchino), and headers or mottoes (Lysian Rakotoson cites a verse by Jacques Lacarrière: “La poésie est placantaire” – Poetry is placental). Book covers, some of which appear to have been selected with great care and for a specific purpose, are also very important for reaching an interpretation. There are compilations whose covers are distinctive (and most of the times in a single color) of the special book series of a publishing house (e.g. Benoît Reiss, Aurelia Lassaque, François-Xavier Maigre, etc.). It would be advisable, though, to note the following: the cover of the book “Paradis Argousins” (Prison Paradises) by Victor Blanc features a Soviet propaganda poster, originating from the art movement of Russian constructivism that was inspired and created by Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1923. This poster perfectly fits the contents of Victor Blanc’s poetry book, as it also matches the word-play / pairing of opposite words of the book’s title. As Franck Delorieux remarks in his preface, this is a “political book”. Memories of demonstrations, a pursuit by police officers during a night in Paris, a quote by Che Guevara, references to the high-profile case of Troy Davies are but a few elements that support Franck Delorieux’s view. The cover of Adeline Baldacchino’s “33 poèmes composés dans la noir (pour jouer avec la lumiere) features an oil painting by Robert Helman titled “Composition (de la series Les Genèses)”; the cover of her other poetry book, “13 poèmes composes le matin (pour traverse l’hiver)”, presents a lithograph made in 1991 by painter and poet Gérard Titus-Charmel, titled “Tournant l’hiver”. Both covers match perfectly the mood of the books: the first compilation is about a sort of rebirth after a hard struggle with the void itself, and this rebirth is also suggested through Helman’s painting on the book cover – which is part of his “Geneses” series of paintings. The same goes for Titus-Charmel’s work “Tournant l’hiver” (at the turning point of winter): this compilation revolves around these particular mental moods, these “winters of loneliness”, as well as all the hardships of this season that the poet must endure. Moreover, her poems are presented in the form of a diary, beginning on January 9th, 2017, and ending on the 1st of March, with a few time gaps in-between. It would be impossible to omit a brief mention of the peritext of these poetry books, since art and poetry are communicating vessels, two sides of the same coin. These elements are prima facie keys of interpretation for penetrating the poet’s world and the spirit of the compilation or the poem.
The morphic practices of contemporary poetry are very diverse and subject to continuous renovations. Punctuation, or its absence, has a very specific function in poems, and at the same time, it creates new and novel forms of poetry. It is worth mentioning the “calligrams” of Victor Blanc, which, instead of following Apollinaire’s classic calligram arrangements, are shaped into a single word that incorporates the poem. This update to Apollinaire’s classic calligrams produces a shift from the iconic to the aniconic and the abstract. The absence of punctuation always signifies something in the poems; in Victor Blanc’s case, the absence of punctuation – except for a few periods and question marks – signifies the pace of walking as the poet promenades around Paris. Adeline Baldacchino places a single period at the end of the two poems featured in this Anthology, in order to point out the end of each day – after all, her poems are organized as some kind of poetic diary. With only the period as sole punctuation mark, placed at the end of his poem, François-Xavier Maigre rekindles memories from childhood and of a lost time (the period signifies precisely this end of the memory and regulates its rhythm). Aurelia Lassaque, on the other hand, in her dialectical poems (constituting a conversation between Odysseus and “Elle”-Her), uses absolutely no punctuation marks (other than a single question mark, which is included in the fragment translated for this book). Relying on the associations between theater, poetry and music, this poetic conversation was written to be read (recited) or staged as a theatrical play – the omission of punctuation is obviously deliberate, since each performer will give the poem his or her own rhythmic beat and intonation.
The blank spaces, both between single verses and between “islets”, as the poet Pierre Chapuis calls verses or phases that are typographically grouped together, reveal and change the rhythm of reading. This fact, in turn, means that the poets’ choices are not random, but that they establish a particular stylistic and symbolic order. According to Henri Meschonnic, “the blank space is not a space inserted within the time of a text. It is a part in its progression, the visual part of the discourse”(6). The blank space can be simultaneously visual and resonating, as a visualization of silence. Other than being able to create “effects of rhythm […], capable of being interpreted proportionally as variations in speed, density or intensity”, blank spaces can also create “zones of silence, as if the poet was withholding things”, which is some sort of “creative silence” that implies “the true wealth of the text, its profound dimension, that which is unsaid”. In the poems of Adeline Baldacchino and François-Xavier Maigre, blank spaces produce this silence, which is visual (we could say that it is almost typographical) and resonant: in Baldacchino, they set the rhythm of a day and its various moments, while in Maigre, they somehow put memories in order, simultaneously expressing nostalgia (deafening silence) and the moment when a memory is recalled. Benoît Reiss, on the other hand, leaves larger gaps between verses, thus creating “short movements” – which is also the title of his poetry book: Gestes courts. These short poems, divided by blank spaces, leave a resonant and visual impression of small and brief moments, contacts and senses. In the end, blank spaces contribute to the realization of the poetic discourse and the “particularity of the modes of signification of modern and contemporary poetry”.
A third aspect of this brief attempt to approach the poetic act is the interaction of poetry with visual arts, theatre or song. Other than Victor Blanc’s calligrams, which clearly fall into the art of painting, Stéphane Korvin’s poetic narrations are a photographic and pictorial exploration of the body. If we look closely, his poems are like small photographs, like snapshots or paintings; besides, he himself began writing so he could embellish his drawings and photographs with captions. On the other hand, the poems of Lysiane Rakotoson and Aurelia Lassaque are intended for recitation. As a consequence, the oral dimension of poetry is prominent in both their cases; Aurelia Lassaque, in particular, is scientifically involved with theater, therefore the boundaries separating poetry from theatre are essentially non-existent; in antiquity, poetry, theater and music constituted a single unified art. Her collection of poems, composed in the form of a dialogue, serves precisely this function: the fact that poetry can be read aloud, put into song and staged as a performance. As we can see, compared with the previous generations, there is a shift in the mode of expression, which is in no way linear.
Taking all the above into account, we can only conclude that French 21st-century poetry is undergoing a revitalization in its modes, means and techniques of expression that emerge from or function within the micro-aspects of everyday life, so that poets will be given the chance to surpass them.
Let us say briefly introduce the poets(11) and mention several characteristics of their poetry, as these are presented in the translated poems included in this Anthology; and since we are talking about poets who all belong – more or less – to the same generation, their order of presentation will be according to each poet’s date of birth.
Benoît Reiss was born in 1976. His poetry book transposes our view of things and the natural world. It is not the subject that reveals, through its movements or gaze, the person it addresses (the “you”); this revelation is done by the natural elements through the power of invocation (“through fishing comes the sea”(12), as Odysseus Elytis said in his poem Maria Nephele), and by doing so, also elucidates the glory of life and poetry: “There is no more sky from earth / and thirst is cured / at the drinking trough / by the rocks learning to become / the palms of your hands” (p.99).
Stéphane Korvin was born in 1981. Female bodies, melancholic figures, natural landscapes dominated by internality, topics revolving around memory and oblivion, light, love, dream, the hollow echo of time passing by, are a few motifs explored by Stéphane Korvin – who, other than being a poet, is also a photographer and sketch artist. The writing of Stéphane Korvin is like taking a photograph or drawing a sketch – in a few words, it is intense and representational (emphasizing outlines and intersections), allowing him to explore everyday life by walking a route that goes from the internal to the external. This physical representation of corporality (eroticism, particular focus on the eyes, discovery of the skin etc.) enables us to approach the Other, and also reach a common language, in order to uncover the depth of (ordinary) things and penetrate poetry itself: “I have a light / ship / that sails / in your mouth / how your mouth / how you wear / how you aim / just like inside your mouth / like the sea / invents / what the skin extends / how your skin / is like an unrestrained bird / between / as in your belly / how the tongue / is like inside your mouth” (p.73).
François-Xavier Maigre was born in 1982. In the sole poetry book he has published so far, the poet draws on the Book of Genesis, and particularly the initial verses of the creation of the world, to revive his own childhood memories (“In the beginning / the anthology of the world / had to be written / the silver of the earth / had to be molded / and I / had to meet you”, p.49). It is an inner journey, a journey of initiation in real time, in order for the author – and us, the readers – to discover the meaning and mystery of life. Poetry is his companion in this quest for meaning and this search for light and transcendental truth. His style combines dreamlike images and artful musicality of verse to introduce memories of childhood and express a deep nostalgia for those times, as well as sadness for the inhumane urban society we live in. His poems, however, also offer us a window, an opening to the future, to the optimistic side of life – such as love or fatherhood. Maigre, having worked in the daily newspaper La Croix, as he himself informs us in his short résumé, seeks spirituality with a human face (Because the child guesses on the fringes of spring / the bitter fruit it carries within it / oh, night of genesis / the moon permeates the heavens, makes fruitful the wait / and the day approaches, p.57).
Adeline Baldacchino was born in 1982. To her, poetry is a way to live more intensely. Her poetry teeters among many contrasting forces: darkness and light, ice and fire, serenity and anger, joy and sadness. Much like the work of the painter Robert Helman, her poetry is one of rebirth through trial and pain. Baldacchino searches for the path, even when it is hidden in darkness, and as she makes her way, she looks for signs that will guide her in decoding the mystery of existence. One of her poetry books is presented in the form of a diary, with entries on different dates (with a few omissions, as might be expected), allowing her to pass the winter. Through this cold and dark wintery landscape, Baldacchino tries to uncover the appropriate words and phrases – the appropriate poetry – to warm her being; she seeks the poetry that provides shelter to those in pain or in doubt; her verses navigate the darkness to be reborn into the light (On this morning of sudden rage / on the embers of sweetness / This morning that digs far below the ground / its bright tunnels / they’d only want to cherish, p.63)
Aurelia Lassaque was born in 1983. In her latest poems, she creates a universe of her own, where mythical force and simplicity coexist. Her book is organized in rhapsodies and dialogues, alluding to the epic poems of Homer. The dialogue is between the legendary Odysseus and a woman with no name (referred to as “She/Elle”), who is the first love of Odysseus, before Homer’s telling of the Odyssey. What’s amazing is that the entire book is bilingual: one part is in French, the other part is in Occitan, a moribund language from the south of France that belongs to the same language family as Catalan. As previously said, she views poetry, theatre and music as a single form of art, therefore her poetry is meant to be read and performed on stage. This small odyssey is a song about nostos, about homecoming – the return to the center, and also to an ancestral birth – and wounded passion, which is placed both in the present and in the past. Nevertheless, as the title of the book suggests, it is also a quest for a face (En quête d’un visage), the face of the lover, which is symbolized by Odysseus. In other words, this collection of poems constitutes a personal rearrangement, a new interpretation of the literary legend of Odysseus: “On his way home, Odysseus counted his steps / Empty home, burned-down roof. Chairs, tables and / bed have their four legs turned towards the hole on the / ceiling. Everything else around them unchanged” (p.41).
Jean-Baptiste Pedini was born in 1984. His poetry arises from his need to express and set his feelings in writing. In fact, his poems very frequently express the exact opposite of what he feels – which is perfectly reasonable, if we consider that poetry also serves as a last resort for those experiencing disappointment or melancholia in the face of life and the course of things. For Pedini, this melancholia is definitely an eternal, yet pointless, search for childhood, which is completely and irrevocably lost in the past. Nevertheless, in his attempt to build his work around a design, Pedini, in his soon-to-be-published book, retraces his steps, his private path connecting childhood with adulthood, the milestones of which are fatherhood and the birth of his children: “Walls burn with heavy fire from now on. On the wallpaper grew a forest of red tears. And on the doors that no one dares open. You move to a corner, at a loss for words to explain this sudden appearance” (p.89).
Lysiane Rakotoson was born in 1987. She, too, tries to give a true and intense description of feelings, pains and joys – in short, to paint a picture of life in the contemporary world. In her latest book, she describes, with inherent – both figuratively and literally – sensibility, a double expectation of birth: that of poetry and her child, which, at the time, had yet to be born (her book Dans l’enclos des hanches (In the enclosure of the hips) was released in the summer of 2018). Using short, clever and balanced verses, Rakotoson tells the story of her own life from the inside to the outside, from the perspective of a particular mental mood, as well as that of the miracle of progressing from pregnancy to birth. Nature is inextricably linked to the above states by her involvement in these processes, in full harmony with the changing seasons; it is, as Jacques Lacarrière said, a “placental poetry”: “Morning of rust and harvest: / I sense the straws that land has strewn over my wounds. / You are so close to arriving that joy won’t let us sleep” (p.95).
Victor Blanc was born in 1992. In his first book, Blanc describes capitalist society and talks about events from recent times (protests, the Troy Davies affair, etc.) in a manner that is both straightforward and shrouded in poetry, while his style is one rarely encountered in contemporary poetry. Instead of relying on the poetry of the past, he seeks to find new ways of poetic composition. He thus develops a form of poetic narration, in which verses move from poem to poem, as if taking a stroll around Paris – in his first book – or a walk around life – in his sophomore and soon-to-be-published collection of poems. What is notable is that in his poems, he deliberately employs elements from all phases of diversity (archaisms, scholarly and common vocabulary, symbols and internet slang, etc.), as well as different styles of writing (free verse, rhyme, ballad, rondeau, etc.). In his sophomore and soon-to-be-published book, Blanc explores even more ways to write, such as the calligrams we mentioned before. In the calligram “Palmier” (Palm Tree), Blanc closes with a sentence that is essentially an exclamation mark; what’s impressive is that the dot of the exclamation mark is an emoticon (smiley or a cute face) that depicts and expresses surprise and admiration towards the Mediterranean region (which the Palm Tree connotes). Once more, Blanc uses the language of informatics and the internet, which he incorporates in his poetry. Blanc also explores other methods to create smuggled poetry, where the reader must read behind and within the lines in order to decode the meaning (this collection will be titled “Filigrane” – watermark, which represents precisely this concept). It wasn’t by chance that he was quickly compared to Arthur Rimbaud, who was the first to say that we must be “absolutely modern” (absolument modern): “It is a name written in the words / on the sandbank In the song of crickets / and drunk scorpions / the sharks of Wall Street see a butterfly” (p.83).
In conclusion, let us agree that poetry, in times where human and aesthetic values are unraveled and put to the test, is not a luxury, as some would have us believe, but a way to cleanse wounds that never took time to heal. Poetry is strong enough to reveal everyday life (or even denounce it), as it is also able to “mend” and recreate the world. In our opinion, the poetic depth and dynamics of this young generation of French poets, as presented in this Anthology, are the best possible answer to the question posed by Hölderlin in his elegy “Brod und Wein” (Bread and Wine):
“Why be a poet in dead time?”
(Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?)
Christos Nikou