Swiss literature – people are too Jaccottet grossly, and according to the new prose and poetry of the Swiss poet Philippe, lives for many decades in the South of France, Grignan. Martin Ebel1 Kommentar1Wolken have Jaccottet, for him, more weight than a skyscraper: Philippe. Photo: Ayse Yavas/Keystone
people you will find in this volume not in vain. People are clearly too coarse and too loud, to the inlet to be found in the fine-nerved sketches of the 94-year-old Philippe Jaccottet. Instead, a Kingfisher shoots by his prose, a small phial of a miracle that threatens to die in the “cage of words” soon. Hardly showed up, wounds of this Kingfisher right back on just like the Robin, Nothing outright, or is it more than “a little gluten”.
A people is found in “The few sounds of” only indirectly, as an observer, the limits of perception, the hear where others are nothing more, or see, still means to identify something, a, for the clouds have more weight than any skyscraper. The world turned away, one might think, is this lyrical prose that arises for nearly seven decades, in the idyllic hamlet of Grignan in Provence, but in what world is this, then?
refugee flows, climate-related disasters, relationship problems are not there for Jaccottet, in any case. It is this Nothing, or Almost Nothing, it’s those threshold moments that are crucial. Moments when the world opens in the first place – or in which it closes and in case of doubt, little leaves, a tiny imprint in the memory, a paw track a maximum, like that of the cat, “the days we had to finish: the perfect silence of their steps wherever they went – over scurry of a bright shadow, for us, half-absent, as a peaceful dream sprung, its just rare shouts, and this time with a shorter and weaker. A little soul in fur Slippers, not much, but still.”
meditations on the age –
A handful of notes, other writers are devoted to Franz Kafka, for example, one of those writers that every shamed who writes to you, or Peter Handke, a “history of losers observers”. By Elisabeth Edl und Wolfgang Matz impeccably translated pieces as meditations on the old to read, as the last questions of his own work, as Jaccottet writes, although the “appearance of revelation” with wearing, but without the drugs, asceticism, without Excess or ecstasy had been concluded: “Perhaps one admits to the lack of seriousness of all of this.”
Thus, the available charge is exhausted, in Jaccottets work of nature would be elevated to a Religion. In fact, its sets off all Prayer-like. Neither vain nor betulich this prose is rather barren and burned out like the fields of Provence in the late summer.
Philippe Jaccottet: The few noises. Late prose and poetry. From the French by Elisabeth Edl und Wolfgang Matz. Hanser, München 2020. 160 p., approx. 34 Fr.
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