ABSTRACT
Jacques Roubaud is a playful, puzzling, erudite, at times obscure yet at other times thoroughly moving "composer" of poetry and prose. Roubaud's mature works, each involving grieving for his deceased wife, constantly presuppose a grim, drab horizontality on which any aspiration to vertical transcendence is foreclosed. Such is his geometry of mourning, and it defines the landscape on which the Oulipian fun-making—alongside the elegiac passages—also occurs. Roubaud's method must of course at some point be channeled. The ever-branching "prose of memory" could conceivably ramify ad infinitum. There are communicative limits to the literary translation of this cognitive model. As has been seen, these sundry literary genres that Roubaud practices all cohere in the importance that the author places on form—an emphasis by no means implying, however, an indifference to emotion and content. Indeed, few works of recent French prose and poetry are as moving as Some Thing Black, the collection of eighty-two poems written in elegy of Alix Cleo Roubaud.
