Festival 2010 NL

Poet


Jacques Roubaud 1932

country: Netherlands
Frans

wordt momenteel gerekend tot de groten van de Franse literatuur. Hij noemde zich ooit ‘vervaardiger van wiskunde en poëzie’. Hij is dichter, vertaler, essayist en onvermoeibaar verdediger van de moderne poëzie. Uit zijn werk spreekt een fascinatie voor logica; op een verrassende manier past hij in zijn gedichten ‘wiskundige strategieën’ toe. Roubaud maakt deel uit van de ‘Werkplaats voor Potentiële Literatuur’ (OULIPO). Het oeuvre van Jacques Roubaud bestaat naast poëzie uit talloze vertalingen.

De keuze van Tatjana Daan: di 16 juni, 20:00 u - grote zaal


Biografie op Poetry International Web

Jacques Roubaud (1932) was born in the town of Caluire, in the Provence region of southern France. He once called himself a ‘manufacturer of mathematics and poetry’. At twenty-two, Roubaud abandoned his literature studies to devote himself to mathematics. In the early 1960s he was working simultaneously on a thesis on set theory and a book of poetry, having found that mathematic strategies work very well in poetic creation. The result was published in 1967, and has as its title , a symbol from set theory, meaning ‘belonging to’. By introducing new rules, Roubaud succeeds in breaking open the time-honoured form of the sonnet. By this procedure he attracted the attention of Raymond Queneau, who recruited Roubaud for his group OULIPO, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’ (which appeared at the 2001 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam).
Thirty-two years after the first collection, he published La forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur des humains (‘The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the hearts of people’), which contains two new series of (partly bizarre-looking) sonnets, as well as poems that come straight from the OULIPO workshop. Roubaud’s fascination for formal logic also returns here, notably in the cycle ‘Six Logical Pieces’, which he read at the 1997 Poetry International Festival. Roubaud’s surprising way with logic was already known to readers of the collection La Pluralité des mondes de Lewis, translated as The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis (1991).
Apart from poetry, Jacques Roubaud has published numerous translations, of modern American as well as traditional Japanese poetry. He has rewritten texts from France’s ancient heritage, notably the tales of the Holy Grail; he is the author of prose books, such as the Hortense trilogy, and an ongoing semi-autobiographic project, begun in 1989, which has produced four books so far. Finally, Jacques Roubaud is an untiring champion of poetry in, among other publications, Poésie, etcetera: ménage (1995), in which he makes a clean sweep of popular prejudices about contemporary poetry. Roubaud’s work has been widely translated.

Author: Jan H. Mysjkin
Translated by Ko Kooman Jacques Roubaud (France, 1932) is counted among the leading French literati today. He is a poet, translator, essayist, and indefatigable champion of modern poetry. His work betrays a fascination for logic; he applies ‘mathematical strategies’ to his poems, with surprising effect. Roubaud is a member of the experimental ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’ (OULIPO). He has been widely translated.



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