Last time we posted anything on the blog, we were celebrating the European Day of Languages and the linguistic diversity of our students and staff. Today is National Poetry Day in the UK which prompted us to think about the ways in which poetry (French-language poetry, in particular) is part of our teaching, research and general areas of interest in French at Stirling. We don’t have specific modules that focus on French poetry and yet it pops up across a range of our courses, from a bit of Baudelaire in Year 1 to Paul Éluard’s ‘Comprenne qui voudra’ in Year 2 as our students examine competing memories in relation to 20th-century French history, all the way through to Prévert in Elizabeth Ezra’s option on Children’s Literature and the poetry of figures like Georges Brassens in Nina Parish’s option module examining la chanson française.
What has been interesting over the course of the day, as colleagues have exchanged emails between classes and meetings about their thoughts on French and Francophone poetry, has been the extent to which it forms part of our own experiences for so many of us in French at Stirling. Of all of us, Nina Parish’s research has most directly involved poetry, from her own doctoral studies right up to more recent work including, for example, her article on ‘Translating Contemporary French Poetry’ co-written with Emma Wagstaff and their edited collection Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry in French. Nina has also just been invited to join the editorial board for the Cahiers Francis Ponge and, in response to my email this morning asking for people’s thoughts on French poetry, it was to Francis Ponge’s prose poem L’Orange that Nina turned, sending me his description of an orange pip:
‘’Mais à la fin d’une trop courte étude, menée aussi rondement que possible, — il faut en venir au pépin. Ce grain, de la forme d’un minuscule citron, offre à l’extérieur la couleur du bois blanc de citronnier, à l’intérieur un vert de pois ou de germe tendre. C’est en lui que se retrouvent, après l’explosion sensationnelle de la lanterne vénitienne de saveurs, couleurs et parfums que constitue le ballon fruité lui-même, – la dureté relative et la verdeur (non d’ailleurs entièrement insipide) du bois, de la branche, de la feuille: somme toute petite quoique avec certitude la raison d’être du fruit.’
As for me (Cristina Johnston, usually the author of bits of these posts), poetry hasn’t formed part of my own research, as such, but I was involved, many years ago, in collaborative translations into French of the fantastic Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, some of which were published in literary reviews in France. And, in the dim and distant past, I did also teach on the translation of poetry, using some poems in the regional dialect of Ticino (the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland) by Elena Ghielmini and Raymond Queneau’s mind-blowing Cent mille milliards de poèmes with postgraduate students.
For Jean-Michel DesJacques, our Language Coordinator, the reference to National Poetry Day prompted a recollection of his German teacher from school, telling his pupils that they were learning German ‘because it’s a beautiful language’, and a more recent Radio Arte Franco-German broadcast of a poem by Paul Celan that Jean-Michel particularly enjoyed and that you can listen to here. For Fraser McQueen, National Poetry Day means more than just ‘conventional’ poetry but expands to include contemporary French rap music and artists including Kery James, Youssoupha, Médine, Rocé, or Scylla. And for Aedín ní Loingsigh, poetry (French and in other languages, too) has been important as a means of getting through good times and bad over the years. She was particularly reminded, for example, of Christiane Taubira reading ‘Dit de la force de l’amour’ by Éluard at the funeral of Tignous, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Aedín also mentioned that she still remembers coming across Éluard for the first time, while she was at school, thanks to an excellent teacher telling them they could be anything they wanted in a poem and getting the class to read ‘La Terre est bleue’ by way of example.
So many different ways that poetry finds its way into our teaching and our lives and that’s before we mention things like the women’s poetry review Soeurs that came out during lockdown and that is a great way of finding out about what’s happening in contemporary French poetry. Or our former colleague, Lou Sarabadzic’s poetry, some of which we’ve been lucky enough to use in our Bridging Materials, but which was also published earlier this year in a collection entitled Éloge poétique du lubrifiant.
With all of that in mind, then, we hope this prompts you to go off and explore the world of French-language poetry and we wish you a Happy National Poetry Day!
French at Stirling 