2023-05-22 10:37:00
Every week, a look at the poetic news. Find all the articles of this meeting ici.
Who is Jean Fanchette? A character, if not major, at least important in the literary world of the second half of the 20th century, his name remains however unknown. The reissue of an anthology of his poems, which he himself prepared before his death in 1992, revives his memory.
Who is Jean Fanchette? The fact that his texts are, in this new book, prefaced by JMG Le Clézio and postfaced by Michel Deguy, says a lot about the man and his literature. Le Clézio links it to Mauritius, the original island, “the hinterland of these poems”, as Fanchette himself says, in exile in Paris. Deguy for his part anchors his poetry in his art of the verb and his work as a psychoanalyst: these poems, assumes the author, “taught me to lire».
On the one hand, lyricism, on the other, openness to the unconscious. And yes, Fanchette brings it all together, and Africa of course, and the intellectual life on the banks of the Seine. Without ever singing the tear. Evidenced by the title chosen by him to bring together the poetic work of his entire life: the Equinox Island evokes this moment when night and day have the same duration. Why should you choose? Classic and embracing modernity, assuming its “part of negritude” and singing the“saxophone hoarseness” heard in a London club, contemplative and rebellious, Fanchette’s writing is truly Métis.
Born in Rose-Hill, Mauritius, in May 1932, Fanchette studied medicine in Paris, which led to a career as a neuropsychiatrist and psychoanalyst. At the same time, he writes, publishes, frequents the big names, French and English, of the moment. At the end of the 1950s, he founded with Anaïs Nin the bilingual magazine Two Cities, in which he notably welcomes the texts of Bonnefoy, Mandiargues on the French side, Miller, Burroughs, Durrell on the American side.
Who was Jean Fanchette? Reading this collection, which covers the long period from 1954 to 1991, gives at least a glimpse of his personality. Because one of the constants of the book is the continual presence of dedicated poems: to friends, to family. Almost every text was composed “for”. At Fanchette, poetry is not a word thrown in the air. It is a way of addressing the people who matter more intensely, of giving them a glimpse “The secret of landscapes on the move / From the other side of the heart.”
Jean Fanchette, the Equinox Island, ed. Philippe Rey, 224 pp. €9.90.
A tribute evening to Jean Fanchette is organized this Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the House of Poetry in Paris.
The extract
Seasons
to Zvi Milshtein
What clamoring Africa in my stomach torments me
When tender green April scatters its rumours,
And what red storm in the tearful forests?
Here, the attentive eye receives the fallow sky:
I no longer know how to name the scale of the gesture
The dodge and leap of the primitive tree.
In the almond the roots are already stretching out,
It’s the farthest land on the way to survival
But the sun is trapped in its own lies…
Too many birds in the sky from the Gospel,
Too many arms in the orchards refuse the revolt.
At home the earth moves halfway to the sky
And the wind spreads in the armpits of the trees.
I hate your fragile lace spring.
Came the manly time marching under the bark
I will return to bruise your harvest,
When the grass grows greener on the graves,
When in the emaciated day of your landscape
Summer will be hoarse as a fist of anger.
(1957)
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