Philippe Jaccottet, the legacy of one of the great French-speaking poets
Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, here in 1987, died on the night of February 24 to 25, 2021, at the age of 95.
AFP - PASCAL GEORGE
Text by: Isabelle Chenu Follow
2 min
The Swiss poet, translator and literary critic Philippe Jaccottet, winner of many prizes including the Goncourt for poetry in 2003, died on the night of Wednesday to Thursday at the age of 95, in Grignan, in the south of France .
This is where he had spent most of his life.
He was one of the great French-speaking poets, one of the most read, studied and translated in the whole world.
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A simple and discreet life despite numerous literary awards and international recognition.
Philippe Jaccottet lived as one imagines poets live, in a chosen solitude, in contact with nature.
Born in Switzerland, he had frequented literary circles in his Parisian youth.
He was the friend of the poets of his generation, but in 1953 he had decided to retire to the village of Grignan, in the south of France, with his wife, the watercolor artist Anne-Marie Haesler.
“
Leaving the intellectual turmoil of Paris was a necessity for my work
,” he explained.
I learned the names of the trees: junipers, pines, cypresses, reeds have become my companions.
"
Touched by grace
During long walks in the scrubland, the poet is touched by grace, those snapshots of joy that spring from nature that he celebrates in particular in
Ce peu de bruits
, published in 2008. Philippe Jaccottet sought to celebrate “
the dimension secret from the world, that which we cannot understand with scientific measures, that which cannot be quantified
”.
He was one of only three poets, along with René Char and Saint-John Perse, to have been published during his lifetime in the prestigious collection of the Pléiade.
His translations have made known in France many writers such as the Austrian Robert Musil (
The Man Without Qualities
), as well as a considerable part of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke.
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