Paris (AFP)
The Swiss poet, translator and literary critic Philippe Jaccottet, winner of many prizes including the Goncourt for poetry, died on the night of Wednesday to Thursday at the age of 95, his son told AFP.
He died at his home in Grignan, in the Drôme, where he will be buried "in the strictest privacy", said Antoine Jaccottet.
French-speaking Swiss, he is 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.
Awarded numerous French and German prizes, including the Goncourt de la poésie (2003) and the Grand prix national de Traduction (1987), Philippe Jaccottet, who has been living in Grignan for more than half a century, is one of the poets contemporaries which has been the subject of more theses and critiques.
The President of the Republic hailed, in a press release, the memory of "one of the greatest poets of the century, who sang the beauty of the world and the fragility of words".
A work which granted him "the rare privilege of knowing the praise of the critics and the recognition of a large public".
Philippe Jaccottet was born on June 30, 1925 in Modon, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, and spent most of his life in Grignan.
His first work, "Three poems to demons", appeared in 1945. He then began to publish many texts, in particular for the Nouvelle Revue de Lausanne.
His first collection of poems "L'Effraie" (1953) was published by Gallimard editions, in the Métamorphoses collection, edited by Jean Paulhan.
He also participated in La Nouvelle Revue Française and made sure to open it up to German literature.
Successful, his poems enter the Gallimard / Poésie collection, notably with "A la lumière d'hiver" (1977) and "La Semaison" (1984).
His translations made famous in France the Austrian writer Robert Musil ("The man without qualities"), the Russian Ossip Mandelstam, the Italian Giuseppe Ungaretti as well as a considerable part of Rilke - including the "Correspondence" with Lou Andreas -Salome.
We also owe him a transposition of "The Odyssey" by Homer, verses by Hölderlin and "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann.
These translations "make him a man of European letters", underlined the press release from the Presidency of the Republic.
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