À la lumière d'hiver

by Philippe Jaccottet

"Autrefois,moi l'effrayé, l'ignorant, vivant à peine,me couvrant d'images les yeux,j'ai prétendu guider mourants et morts.Moi, poète abrité,épargné, souffrant à peine,aller tracer des routes jusque-là !À présent, lampe soufflée,main plus errante, qui tremble,je recommence lentement dans l'air."

Genres: Poetry, French Literature, Classics, France, School, Literature

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Parmi les œuvres poétiques de langue française du XXe siècle, celle de Jaccottet est, après celle d'Henri Michaux, le sujet du plus grand nombre de thèses et de mémoires. Le nombre considérable d'articles, de livres (listés en annexe), de recueils critiques, et d'hommages dans des revues prestigieuses, témoigne de l'importance d'un poète que le critique Bruno Blanckeman considère comme en voie de devenir un classique : Poésie 1946-1967 et À la lumière d’hiver ont été inscrits au programme de l'agrégation de lettres modernes 2003-2004 ; les élèves de terminale littéraire ont pu le découvrir en marge de l'étude de son ami Yves Bonnefoy en 2005-2006, ont eu sa traduction de l'Odyssée au programme de 2009 à 2011, et son recueil À la lumière d’hiver en 2011-2012. Philippe Jaccottet a en outre reçu de nombreux prix prestigieux. Ses œuvres poétiques ont été rassemblées dans un volume de la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade paru le 20 février 2014 qui a été édité par José-Flore Tappy, Hervé Ferrage, Doris Jakubec et Jean-Marc Sourdillon et préfacé par Fabio Pusterla.

Reviews

[Steve]

Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925)

No ideas but in things - William Carlos Williams


As a youngster, the first poet whose work stunned me out of the rejection of poetry inculcated by my "education" was William Carlos Williams. Though I later found that there was much more to his work, his Imagist poems were exactly what I needed then: carefully and intensely observed scenes of the real world to clean away the sloppy sentiments and grandiose rhetoric I thought at the time constituted the poetic canon.(*) That more could be communicated by the images than just the images themselves slowly revealed itself to me as I followed my nose through 20th century Western poetry and then classical Japanese and Chinese poetry. I'm still following it.

And it (along with a kind GR friend) has led me to the Vaudois poet, critic and translator Philippe Jaccottet (b. 1925). A little less than a year ago I read his Pensées sous les nuages : Poèmes (1983) on loan from the library and was so impressed that I purchased yet another volume of Gallimard's wonderful Collection Poésie - A la lumière d'hiver, précédé de Leçons et de Chants d'en bas, et suivi de Pensées sous les nuages.(**) Four books in one, yet even with pages dominated by white space the page count reaches a mere 170! Jaccottet is one of those laconic writers for whom intensity and close observation replace rhetoric and sentiment. Back to my beginnings...

A recipient of multiple literary prizes from Switzerland, France and Germany, Jaccottet is on the road to be recognized as a classic: his Œuvres appeared in Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 2014. And for good reason.

The relative spareness of Jaccottet's poetic Œuvre (particularly compared to his work as translator, which includes Homer's Odyssey) seems to be due to an extremely exigent search for the Truth and its means of verbal expression. This exigence and the well known obstacles to its fulfillment can lead to the poet's despair:

La vérité semblait pourtant si simple, je n'en garde plus que la coque, vide, même pas : des masques, une singerie…

(The truth appeared so simple, yet I retain nothing more than the shell, empty, not even that: some masks, a foolish simulacrum...)

But unlike some 20th century authors, Jaccottet did not let himself be obsessed by the problems and effectively forget the world; he pulled up his socks and returned to the struggle of wrenching some kind of truth from his (our) limited access to that truth and his (our) circumscribed ability to express it.

Like the Imagists and classical East Asian poets, Jaccottet offers poems that are deeply felt images, brief epiphanies of being.

Dans la montagne, dans l’après-midi sans vent
et dans le lait de la lumière
luisant aux branches encore nues des noyers,
dans le long silence :
le murmure de l’eau
qui accompagne un instant le chemin,
l’eau décelable à ces fétus brillants,
à ces éclats de verre dans la poussière,
sa claire et faible voix
de mésange apeurée.

(In the mountains, in the windless afternoon
and in the light's milk
glistening in the still nude branches of the walnut,
in the long silence:
the murmur of the water
accompanying the path for a moment,
the water distinguishable from these brilliant stalks of straw,
from these shards of glass in the dust,
its clear and weak voice
of a frightened titmouse.

- translation by yours truly)

And like the East Asian poets', his images bring the reader to the threshold of the feeling without describing it or instructing the reader what to feel. Often enough his images are springboards to abstracted movements of the spirit, as in this poem from Leçons, in the sense of "readings from the book of the world."

Plus aucun souffle.

Comme quand le vent du matin
a eu raison
de la dernière bougie.

Il y a en nous un si profond silence
qu'un comète
en route vers la nuit des filles de nos filles,
nous l'entendrions.

(Not even a breath.

As when the morning's wind
has snuffed out
the last candle.

There is in us such a profound silence
that a comet
on the way to the night of our daughters' daughters,
we would hear it.

- translation by yours truly)

In fact, in Jaccottet's poetry the metaphysical is always just a blink of the eye, a turn of the head away.

Je me redresse avec effort et je regarde:
il y a trois lumières, dirait-on.
Celle du ciel, celle qui de là-haut
s’écoule en moi, s’efface,
et celle dont ma main trace l’ombre sur la page.

L’encre serait de l’ombre.

Ce ciel qui me traverse me surprend.

On voudrait croire que nous sommes tourmentés
pour mieux montrer le ciel. Mais le tourment
l’emporte sur ces envolées, et la pitié
noie tout, brillant d’autant de larmes
que la nuit.

(I struggle to sit up and look outside.
You could say there are three kinds of light:
Light from the sky, light from above
that flows into me and then quickly fades,
light whose shadow my hand
traces on the page.

Shadows turn to ink.

The sky that flows through me
takes me by surprise.

You’d like to think your torments exist
to better reveal the sky. But torment
weighs down these fanciful flights, and pity
drowns everything, shining as brightly
as the tears of the night.

- translation by Paul Weinfield)

Although no poem in this volume is longer than two pages, Jaccottet does create sequences of poems interrelated by mood, voice and diction, sometimes theme. And the always restrained poet's Self is sometimes effaced in favor of some other, nearly as restrained Self. Despair is balanced by joy is balanced by suffering is balanced by hope. Such is the characteristic movement of Jaccottet's work.

Aren't restraint and balance the very characteristics of the classic?


(*) In the meantime I've learned to appreciate some of the beauties of rhetoric when it is fresh and not yet turned into recipe and empty gesture.

(**) Much of Jaccottet's work has been translated into English: I stopped counting at ten books of translations (some bilingual) in Goodread's list alone.

[Marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jaccottet's work is no easy reading: you have to taste it, to let it trickle through and thoroughly explore its meanings. And those meanings are richly present, and in very diverse forms (prose poems, dialogues, monologues, ...). This book brings together a number of works from the period 1966-1982, when the poet had long made his mark, and that's very clear from the rich register he uses, not to impressionate and blow your socks of, but rather in a very retained manner, like a silent song.
I was particularly impressed by the ' Chants d'en Bas ' that explores the problematic relationship between words and reality and ' A la lumière d'hiver ', a richly-layered mythical song. I must confess that in ' Pensées sous les nuages ' I got lost, it didn't really resonate. Jaccottet clearly is a challenging poet.

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A la lumière d’hiver
By Philippe Jaccottet

Modern poetry :

« Muet. Le lien des mots commence à se défaire
aussi. Il sort des mots.
Frontière. Pour un peu de temps
nous le voyons encore.
Il n’entend presque plus.
Hèlerons-nous cet étranger s’il a oublié
notre langue, s’il ne s’arrête plus pour écouter ?
Il a affaire ailleurs.
Il n’a plus affaire à rien.
Même tourné vers nous,
C’est comme si on ne voyait plus que son dos.

Dos qui se voute
Pour passer sous quoi ? »

Dark meditation:
Autumn leafs, rain, cold wind, snow and ice, time to die.

[Méline · Rating 1 out of 5]

j’ai RIEN compris

2eme lecture (avec la fiche de la prof cette fois) : j’ai mieux compris la première partie mais le reste c’est flou
j’aime pas

[Kübra · Rating 3 out of 5]

En kötüsü, şimdi, yakında veya uzakta hiç kimsenin
olmaması.

Rüzgârın Savurduğu Fragmanlar, özellikle de Şairin mezarı kısmı çok etkileyiciydi.

[Romane Larreur · Rating 3 out of 5]

j’ai pas compris grand chose mais ma partie préférée c’est chant d’en bas

[Sevva · Rating 5 out of 5]

« Qui m'aidera ? Nul ne peut venir jusqu'ici.
Qui me tiendrait les mains ne tiendrait pas celles qui tremblent,
qui mettrait un écran devant mes yeux ne me garderait pas |de voir,
qui serait jour et nuit autour de moi comme un manteau
ne pourrait rien contre ce feu, contre ce froid.
D'ici, j'atteste au moins qu'il est un mur
qu'aucun engin, qu'aucune trompette n'ébranle.
Rien ne m'attend plus désormais que le plus long et le pire. »
Est-ce ainsi qu'il se tait dans l'étroitesse de la nuit ?

[Elou (from-b612) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philippe Jaccottet est pour moi *le* poète français contemporain qui mériterait de passer plus tard au statut de classique. J'ai rarement lu un recueil aussi imagé et délicat, tout en dentelle sans jamais passer par la préciosité.

[Samed Arslan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A présent, lampe soufflée,
main plus errante, qui tremble,
je recommence lentement dans l'air.

[esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

tres beau j ai aimé presque tous les poemes, surtout ceux sur la mort et ceux sur les mots ( metapoetiques) joli travail d images sur la nature , tres inspirant merci mon petit phiphi