ABSTRACT
As translator J. Kates admits in his introduction to When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, the poetry of Jean-Pierre Rosnay (1926–2009) is out of fashion in France “in favor of more pyrotechnical linguistics.” Out of fashion, indeed, though “pyrotechnical” is perhaps not quite the word for the poetic styles that attract the most critical attention nowadays. Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, André du Bouchet, and Jacques Dupin, to mention five major poets of Rosnay’s generation, rarely set off linguistic fireworks in their oft-terse, sometimes aphoristic or fragmentary, philosophically informed writings; and although “pyrotechnical” arguably describes the witty, wide-ranging diction of a sixth essential contemporary, Jacques Réda, who writes in classical alexandrines and has revived a lyricism of another timbre, more important differences—involving metaphysics, irony, and realist imagery—can be defined. Let it suffice to say that the author of Comme un bateau prend la mer and the longtime animator of the Club des Poètes bistro on the rue de Bourgogne in Paris was probably the last representative of a fanciful, playful, emotionally direct, yet also sometimes politically committed kind of post-surrealist lyric verse that was also penned by Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and Raymond Queneau. The “tone” of these poets, excepting Desnos, is no longer—or perhaps temporarily not— à la mode, outside of restrained circles of aficionados.
