{"id":3102,"date":"2024-02-18T16:25:47","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T15:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/?p=3102"},"modified":"2024-02-18T16:28:25","modified_gmt":"2024-02-18T15:28:25","slug":"a-loree-du-pays-fertile-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/2024\/02\/18\/a-loree-du-pays-fertile-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A l’Or\u00e9e du Pays Fertile, Oeuvres Po\u00e9tiques Compl\u00e8tes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Texte de John Taylor<\/a> pour le Times Literary Supplement<\/a> du 28 octobre 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jacques Lacarri\u00e8re (1925-2005) was a French homme de lettres<\/em> who knew how to make his own enthusiasms contagious. His translations of ancient Greek literature (Herodotus, Pausanias) still stimulate bookish French tourists exploring Greece. This is likewise true of his travel-writing classic, L\u2019\u00c9te grec<\/em> (1976), inspired by extensive stays in a country whose contemporary poets and novelists he also translated. Another popular book, Chemin faisant<\/em> (1974), recounts a five-month, one-thousand-kilometre hike from the Lorraine to the Corbi\u00e8res. He wrote engaging books on topics that seem not so engaging, such as mythology, Gnosticism, and religious solitude (as practiced by the hermits of Mount Athos). His best-known novel, Marie d\u2019\u00c9gypte<\/em> (1983), tells the story of the Egyptian prostitute and Christian convert (344?\u2013421?) who fled to the desert; a later novel, La Poussi\u00e8re du monde<\/em> (1997), chronicles the adventures of the Turkish Sufi poet Yunus Emre (1240?\u20131321?). Although Lacarri\u00e8re held no religious beliefs, he was fascinated by saints, anchorites, archaic gods and, as he puts it in the poem \u201cYggdrasil\u201d, \u201cthe troubled shadows of roots ever thirsting for what is obscure\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His poetry is less known. Except for three small volumes, L\u2019Aurige<\/em> (1977), Lapidaire<\/em> \/ Lichens<\/em> (1985), and \u00c0 la tomb\u00e9e du bleu<\/em> (1986), his verse was dispersed in reviews or issued in limited editions illustrated by artist-friends. This is why his collected poems, published under the title \u00c0 l\u2019or\u00e9e du pays fertile<\/em> (At the Edge of the Fertile Land), opens an unexpected door to a poet worth discovering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving in post-war Paris from provincial Orl\u00e9ans (where he had played \u201cbeneath the eyelids of the sky\u201d like \u201cyoung Icarus\u201d), Lacarri\u00e8re was initially influenced by Andr\u00e9 Breton, but even more so by Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire. The diction and vigorous rhythms of Notebook of a Return to My Native Land<\/em> revealed \u201cthe powers and unsuspected magic\u201d of French to the young man, as he explains in one of the short prefaces that he drafted, before his death, for each section of this volume. The Martinican poet uses rare words from the natural sciences and builds complex imagery blending scenes from the present with African history or mythology. An excellent observer of nature, Lacarri\u00e8re likewise favours botanical and geological precision; he especially ponders the \u201cunappeased oracles\u201d of ancient Greece and, more broadly, Mediterranean civilisations. Already in his early poetry and also like C\u00e9saire, he evokes synaesthetic experiences. In the poetic prose piece \u201cFragment,\u201d for instance, an unnamed \u201cyou\u201d\u2014probably a lover, but perhaps his unattainable true self\u2014whispers the words \u201clisten to the smell of the reeds\u201d and the poet henceforth feels \u201chis entire life rustling\u201d. Lacarri\u00e8re\u2019s poetry and prose poetry are often fuelled by an incantatory lyricism that makes them readymade for reciting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is indeed lyricism that is absent in several French poets of Lacarri\u00e8re\u2019s generation. Lacarri\u00e8re puts his faith in words whereas Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Philippe Jaccottet and others have expressed their scepticism about the ability of language to name things, feelings and perceptions \u201cwithout cheating\u201d (as Jaccottet phrases it), without deceptive \u201cpoetic beauty\u201d (as Bonnefoy emphasizes). Lacarri\u00e8re follows the opposite path by defining the poet\u2019s \u201conly weapon\u201d as \u201cthe incandescent word\u201d and by seeing poetic language as outliving \u201call the materials used by mankind, Cyclopean walls, wooden houses, stone buildings, marble edifices.\u201d For him, every word can potentially be a contemporary of the \u201cFirst Man\u201d and a poet should be an \u201cAdam of Words.\u201d Occasionally this vantage point gets the better of Lacarri\u00e8re, when words flow too smoothly and sound takes precedence over sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a more subdued kind of poetry also comprised in his volume, his epigrams about gems and his eight poems and prose poems about lichens similarly differ from much French writing focused on objects. Like Francis Ponge, the pioneer of the genre, a French poet usually searches for the \u201cthing in itself\u201d and rejects subjectivity. Lacarri\u00e8re is more relaxed. He says \u201cyou\u201d to natural objects and sometimes underscores his relationships with them. Chalk, for example, enables him to write down his own \u201cpelagic memory\u201d and gneiss induces his \u201clove\u201d for this \u201cname made of ash and grey granite.\u201d He has no paralyzing scruples about anthropopathism and sometimes sees natural things as animated by non-material forces. A tree has an \u201cunconscious\u201d and a \u201cmemory\u201d; an agate represents the \u201cremorse of fire\u201d; \u201cdesire gets nicked\u201d on the sharp edges of pyrite cubes that have been \u201cinitiated\u201d to the various kinds of patience possessed\u2014or played, for there is a pun here\u2014by Time. Above all, as Lacarri\u00e8re states in an untitled text included in the \u201cImmemorial Orpheus\u201d section, he believed that poetic images could \u201cenchant\u201d. Rare in contemporary poetry, this goal is accomplished quite often in his optimistic oeuvre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Taylor<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, October 28, 2011, p. 23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Texte de John Taylor pour le Times Literary Supplement du 28 octobre 2011. Jacques Lacarri\u00e8re (1925-2005) was a French homme de lettres who knew how to make his own enthusiasms contagious. His translations of ancient Greek literature (Herodotus, Pausanias) still stimulate bookish French tourists exploring Greece. This is likewise true of his travel-writing classic, L\u2019\u00c9te grec (1976), inspired by … <\/p>\n

Continuer la lecture de « A l’Or\u00e9e du Pays Fertile, Oeuvres Po\u00e9tiques Compl\u00e8tes »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-textes-sur-loeuvre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3102"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3106,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3102\/revisions\/3106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cheminsfaisant.org\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}