Francis Ponge

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Francis Ponge (born March 27, 1899 in Montpellier , † August 6, 1988 in Le Bar-sur-Loup ( Département Alpes-Maritimes )) was a French writer .

Life

The son of a wealthy Protestant family grew up in Avignon . Even at high school, he stood out with brilliant essays. He published his first sonnet at the age of 17 under a pseudonym. Twice he failed because of his nerves in the oral entrance examination of the École normal supérieure . Instead, he studied law in Paris and Strasbourg . During the First World War he worked in France as a publisher and journalist and had connections with the Surrealists . In the last year of the First World War , he was drafted into military service for a few months in 1918.

Francis Ponge sympathized with the Russian Revolution, joined the Socialist Party in 1919 and the French Communist Party in 1937 , from which he left in 1947. During the Second World War he was active in the Resistance . Due to the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre , Ponge became known to a larger audience in 1944. After a short stay in Algeria , he returned to France, where he was a professor at the Alliance française from 1952 to 1965 . In 1974 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature . Since 1980 he has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

He died in 1988 as a highly respected, multi-award-winning poet at the age of 89.

Ponges poetics

Ponge puts things at the center in his texts . It can be a pebble or a magnolia, an oyster or a candle, a basket or a soap. There is nothing that cannot be part of it. In describing (or rather evoking) these things, he uses a language in which scientific precision is mixed with poetry and onomatopoeia. Sobriety and poetry play together. Ponge doesn't want to praise and sing about things, but rather bring them to life with language. The fact that things always have names that we learn as children is not only beautiful and useful in his eyes, but also a curse. Because we can no longer see them with an open mind. A painter, on the other hand, can simply show them and thereby sharpen our senses for their peculiarities. The closer we look, the more we discover special features in them. If you look at it from the shore, the sea can look very monotonous, but on closer inspection it can turn into a "thing" full of different shapes and colors. Which is why Francis Ponge explains in The Notebook of the Pine Forest ( Le Carnet du bois de pins ): "My work is that of a constant correction of my expression ... in favor of the raw object."

On the one hand, Ponge is interested in the thing as such, as it is, on the other hand, he is interested in the relationship we have with it. For example, he says of the soap: "When I rub my hands with it, the soap foams, it cheers." This is how things begin to come to life. But they also have a life of their own. This can already be seen from the fact that children perceive certain things not only as objects, but as beings that lead a life of their own by making noises - such as in the case of a creaking door - or - as can be the case with water - Form bubbles.

Just as Ponge focuses on the individual things and does not talk about the big picture, he also restricts himself to small literary forms. In his Pour un Malherbe , published in 1965, he explains: "Ever since I was a child, it has seemed to me as if the only valid texts had to be engraved in a stone."

Works (selection)

literature

  • Chris Andrews: Poetry and cosmogony: science in the writing of Queneau and Ponge . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-420-0567-X
  • Bernard Beugnot: Poétique de Francis Ponge: le palais diaphane . PUF, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-13-042747-2
  • Entretiens de Francis Ponge avec Philippe Sollers . Gallimard / Editions du Seuil, Paris 1970
  • Dorothee Kimmich : Living things in the modern age . Konstanz, Konstanz University Press 2011, ISBN 978-3-86253-008-3
  • Michèle Monte / André Bellatorre: Le printemps du temps: poétiques croisées de Francis Ponge et Philippe Jaccottet . Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l'Université de Provence 2008, ISBN 978-2-85399-689-1
  • Michel Peterson (Ed.): Francis Ponge . In the Oeuvres & Critiques series . Verlag Narr, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-8233-9970-5
  • Jean Pierrot: Francis Ponge . Corti, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-7143-0484-2
  • Christian Prigent: La 'besogne' des mots chez Francis Ponge . In: Littérature 29/1978, pp. 90-97

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b c “The Voice of the Stones” 25 years ago today, the French writer Francis Ponge , Maike Albath died on Deutschlandradio Kultur on August 6, 2013, accessed August 7, 2013
  2. ^ Honorary Members: Francis Ponge. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 19, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ponge, Francis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Montpellier , France
DATE OF DEATH August 6, 1988
Place of death Le Bar-sur-Loup