André du Bouchet (April 7, 1924 – April 19, 2001) was a French poet.
Contents
Biography
Born in Paris, André du Bouchet lived in France until 1941 when his family left occupied Europe for the United States. He studied comparative literature first at Amherst College and then at Harvard University. After teaching for a year, he returned to France. Here Du Bouchet became friends with the poets Pierre Reverdy, René Char, and Francis Ponge, and with the painters Pierre Tal-Coat and Alberto Giacometti.
Du Bouchet was one of the precursors of what would come to be called "poésie blanche" or "white poetry." In 1956, he published a collection of poems entitled Le Moteur blanc or "The White Motor". In 1966, he, along with (among others) Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts and Gaëtan Picon, founded the poetry revue L'Ephémère. Twenty issues were published from 1966 to 1973.
In 1961, Du Bouchet's first major poetry collection, Dans la chaleur vacante, was published to critical acclaim and he won the Prix de la critique (the Critic's Prize) for that year.
He also wrote art criticism, most notably about the works of Nicolas Poussin, Hercules Seghers, Tal-Coat, Bram van Velde and Giacometti, and translated works by Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Laura Riding, William Faulkner, Shakespeare and James Joyce.
In 1983 he won the National Poetry Prize or "Prix national de la poésie".
André du Bouchet died in 2001 at the age of 76, in Truinas, Drôme department of France.
Poetry
André du Bouchet's poetry—greatly and conflictually influenced by the poetic and interpretive preoccupations of Stéphane Mallarmé, the "banality" of Pierre Reverdy's images, Arthur Rimbaud's "abrasive/coarse reality", the work of Henri Michaux, as well as the philosophical work of Heidegger—is characterized by a valuation of the page layout (with words erupting from the white of the page), by the use of free verse and, often, by difficult grammar and elusive meaning (he writes in "Notes on Translation" that sense "is not fixed"). As a result of these influences, his work evokes a sense of an existential, if not elemental, Heraclitian present. The natural elements of earth and air reappear constantly in his poems. The world, as he has written, will not end up in a book, as Mallarmé had claimed, since for du Bouchet the world has no end.
Du Bouchet's poetry confronts (that is to say, it touches with its front or forehead) external reality (mountains, wind, stones...) and the words describe, and are at the same time a part of, that reality. (How, then, could sense ever be fixed?, he asked.) This confrontation provokes a sense of otherness (not in a purely Heideggerian manner, as Du Bouchet's being is revealed as an object of flesh in its nudity and poverty) and a realization of the presence of objects and elements in the world and of the self as such an object, a "thing among things", as he frequently writes, echoing the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
List of works
Mercure de France :
Dans la chaleur vacante, 1961 (reissued in 1991 by Poésie/Gallimard), awarded the Critic's Prize (fr: Prix de la Critique).
La Tempête de William Shakespeare (translation), 1963.
Où le soleil, 1968.
Qui n'est pas tourné vers nous, 1972.
Voyage en Arménie de Ossip Mandelstam (translation), first edition in 1983, reissued in 2004.
Poèmes de Paul Celan (translation), 1986.
Ici en deux, 1986 (reissued in 2011 by Poésie/Gallimard).
Désaccordée comme par de la neige, Tübingen, 22 May 1986, 1989.
Axiales, 1992.
Poèmes et proses, 1995.
Entretien dans la montagne by Paul Celan (translated in collaboration with John E. Jackson), 1996.
L’Emportement du muet, 2000.
Fata Morgana :
Air 1950-1953 followed by Défets, 1986.
Laisses, 1984 (reissue).
L'Incohérence, 1984 (reissue).
Rapides, 1984 (reissue).
Peinture, 1983.
Le Voyage en Arménie, by Ossip Mandelstam (translation), 1983 (reissued in 2004).
Interviews
"Avec du Bouchet", interview with Georges Piroué (1961), L'étrangère No.14-15, La Lettre Volée, June 2007.
"André du Bouchet à la croisée des langages", Le monde des livres, 10 June 1983 (L'étrangère No.14-15).
"Déplacement de glaciers. Récit d'entretiens avec André du Bouchet" by Daniel Guillaume, Poétiques et Poésies contemporaines. Etudes, Le Temps qu'il fait, 2003.
"Entretien avec André du Bouchet" by D. Grandmont, L'Humanité, 10 November 1995 (L'étrangère No.14-15).
Promenades ethnologiques en France, three broadcasts in several parts, for which A. du Bouchet is producer and actor, France Culture, August 1981.
Surpris par la nuit, interview with A. Veinstein, France Culture, 24 January 1995.
Surpris par la nuit, à propos de Andains et de Poèmes et proses, France Culture, 14 August 1999
Surpris par la nuit, "Espaces de la poésie", broadcast by Jean-Pascal Léger, France Culture, 23–24 December 2002.