Jacques Roubaud

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Jacques Roubaud, 2010

Jacques Roubaud (born December 5, 1932 in Caluire-et-Cuire near Lyon ) is a French writer, poet and mathematician. His work is characterized by the mixture of poetry and prose , reality and fiction , literature and mathematics . The Hortense cycle is one of his most famous works . This consists of three novels, the first of which: The beautiful Hortense was published in Paris in 1985.

Life

childhood

Jacques Roubaud - son of the teacher Suzanne Molino and the teacher Lucien Roubaud - spent his childhood first in Carcassonne , where he attended a special class for literature. However, he broke this off and then switched to mathematics class. From an early age he became interested in poetry and the sun set. At the age of twelve he wrote his first surrealist- inspired poems, which were published in 1945 under the title Poésies juvéniles . His second collection of poems, Voyage du soir , was published in 1952.

After 1945

After the Second World War, Roubaud studied mathematics at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris. Here he met Pierre Lusson and he attended courses from Choquet, Laurent Schwartz and Claude Chevalley , which impressed him very much. On the recommendation of Raymond Queneau , Roubaud joined the group Oulipo ( Ouvroir de litérature potentialielle ) in 1966 . Together with Paul Braffort, he founded the Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (ALAMO). The numerous artists with whom Roubaud has worked include: a. Georges Perec , Florence Delay , Paul Fournel , Michel Deguy and the composer François Sarhan . As a professor, Jacques Roubaud taught mathematics at the Université Paris X Nanterre and, in the 1990s, formal poetics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , EHESS.

plant

Jacques Roubaud became known for his novel Die Schöne Hortense , published in Paris in 1985 . It is the first of three novels that deal with the heroine Hortense, who is also the namesake for the two other novels: The Abduction of Hortense and The Exile of the Beautiful Hortense . These are crime novels. On the one hand it is about the secret of the Poldevian cat Alexandre Vladimirovitch as well as the seduction of the Hortense by the Poldevian Prince Morgan, on the other hand it is also about the clarification of the "horror of the household goods dealers".

Literature and Mathematics: OuLiPo

Jacques Roubaud and the numbers

Jacques Roubaud had a passion for numbers and mathematics as a child. Numbers have a symbolic meaning for him and he connects them with personal events. It can even be said that, without considering the mathematical character, an analysis of Roubaud's works can only be one-sided and thus incomplete.

Roubaud is a specialist in poetry. For him, poetry means: number and rhythm, form and formula. Poetry is articulated through meter, rhyme, stanza form and an often subtle combination of sounds, letters and words. This is exactly what the troubadours had introduced into the "modern" languages ​​of the West, and this is precisely where their legacy lies, for example in the sonnet genre, which Roubaud particularly valued. Roubaud is a very productive poet, a "poeta doctus", who is familiar with the late antique-medieval tradition of the artes liberales , the liberal arts, in which literary and mathematical culture still lived in a common house.

“There is a natural relationship between poetry and numbers. This tradition goes back to Pythagoras and continued into the Middle Ages. Many old texts are based on the number that is hidden; on the number that serves as the structure. The numbers of the Greeks were infinitely more complex than our arithmetic system; they included weight, harmony, person. Of this wealth we have only received the quantity, the order and the naming. If my novel can really be read as a framework of numbers, it is because, like Queneau, I wanted to tie in with the tradition of encrypted text. ... Just take the math: its alleged rigor is only valid in a high-security laboratory, where there is no danger of the absurd invading. Imagine an escaped theorem ! What a disaster! Mathematicians allow themselves to be tempted by their tendency to simplify to think incessantly about how to avoid thinking. "

- Roubaud, June 1985, Le Magazine littéraire

OuLiPo

Roubaud's passion for numbers and mathematics is clearly evident in many of his works. Because of his volume of poetry ε, poésie ( ε is the mathematical symbol for an element of a crowd ), members of the OuLiPo group notice him. This is a loose association of writers, scientists, especially mathematicians and artists, around Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, whose playful, combinatorial text production is based on mathematical orders. They create so-called contraintes (formal constraints), which, however, do not restrict the production of the text, but rather create new possibilities.

Roubaud is the inventor of several contraintes , such as B. the baobab ( baobab ) and the haiku oulipien géneralisé (general oulipotic haiku). With the help of the contraintes, Oulipo tries chance, i. H. the unforeseen, eliminating the unknown in the production of a text or leaving as little as possible to chance. An example of a contrainte would be in his novel fifty-five thousand five hundred fifty-five balls , which he tied to numbers that appear regularly in the text and culminate in the number that gave the German translation its title. He co-founded the magazine "Change" and wrote together with Octavio Paz and others in 1971 the first European multilingual Renga poem . Roubaud also translated Japanese and modern American poems and books such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark .

Works

The life of Jacques Roubaud is the subject of several of his works. For example:

  • Autobiography, chapitre dix, poèmes avec des moments de repos en prose. Gallimard, 1977
  • Impératif Catégorique. Seuil, 2008
Works published in German (selection)
  • The beautiful Hortense. Translated by Eugen Helmlé . Hanser, Munich 1989 (La Belle Hortense. Points, Paris 1985)
  • Treatise on the Light. Translated from Alexandre Métraux. Neue Bremer Presse, Bremen 1989 (Traité de la lumière)
  • The kidnapping of the beautiful Hortense. Translated by Eugen Helmlé. Hanser, Munich 1991 (L'Enlèvement d'Hortense)
  • The exile of the beautiful Hortense. Translated by Eugen Helmlé. DTV, Munich 1994 (L'Exil d'Hortense)
  • The numerological arrangement of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta . Translated by Peter Geble. Plasma, Berlin 1997 (La disposition numérologique du Rerum vulgarium fragmenta)
  • Something black. Poems. Transferred from Brit Bartel, assoc. Carla A. Rösler, Rainer Schedlinski . Drawings by Michael Voges. Galrev, Berlin 2000 (Quelque chose noir)
  • State of the places. Poems. Translated by Ursula Krechel . Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2000 (La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains)
  • 55555 balls. Translator Elisabeth Edl . Hanser, Munich 2003 (La dernière balle perdue)
  • The overgrown park. Narrative. Translated by Tobias Scheffel . Wagenbach, Berlin 2010 ISBN 978-3-8031-3227-7 (Parc sauvage, récit)
works published only in French (selection)
  • Voyage du soir, Seghers, coll.PS, 1952.
  • Renga (en collaboration with Octavio Pas, C. Tomlison, E. Sanguinetti), poésie, Gallimard, 1971
  • Graal Fiction, Gallimard, 1978
  • La bibliothèque oulipienne, En collaboration avec Paul Fournel, 3 vol., Seghers, 1987–1990
  • Le Grand Incendie de Londres, récit avec incises et bifurcations, Seuil, 1985–1987, 1989
  • La Princesse Hoppy ou le Conte du Labrador, Hatier, 1990
  • La boucle, Seuil, 1993
  • Poésie: récit, Seuil, 2000
  • Graal théâtre, Gallimard, 1997
  • Graal théâtre, Gallimard, 2005

Prices

  • 1986 Prix France Culture for Quelque chose noir
  • 1990 Grand prize national de la poésie
  • 2008 Grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand de l'Académie francaise

literature

  • Vincent Landel : Jacques Roubaud, in Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch, ed .: Vive la littérature! Contemporary French literature. Hanser, Munich 1989, p. 165f., With photo (transl. From: Le Magazin Littéraire, June 1985, transl. Kristian Wachinger)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roubaux at the ETHZ  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.lit.ethz.ch  
  2. ↑ Elvira Laskowski-Caujolle: The power of four: From the Pythagorean number to the modern mathematical concept of structure in Jacques Roubaud's oulipotic story "La princesse Hoppy ou le conte du Labrador" . Peter Lang / Arteffekt, Bern 1999, p. 55
  3. ↑ Elvira Laskowski-Caujolle: The power of four: From the Pythagorean number to the modern mathematical concept of structure in Jacques Roubaud's oulipotic story "La princesse Hoppy ou le conte du Labrador" . Peter Lang / Artifact, Bern 1999, p. 17.
  4. ↑ The freedom of the poet. To Jacques Roubaud. 12th International Spring Book Week , Munich, March 2001. By Jürgen Ritte
  5. ↑ Elvira Laskowski-Caujolle: The power of four: From the Pythagorean number to the modern mathematical concept of structure in Jacques Roubaud's oulipotic story La princesse Hoppy ou le conte du Labrador, Peter Lang / Arteffekt, 1999; P. 115.
  6. ^ Journal of French Literature, Volume 117-118, Ed. Academy of Sciences and Literature , Mainz. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2007 ISSN  0044-2747 (print)
  7. ↑ http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendung/buechermarkt/223127/
  8. ↑ http://www.galrev.com/material/seiten/roubaud.htm
  9. ↑ http://poezibao.typepad.com/poezibao/2005/06/jacques_roubaud.html
personal data
SURNAME Roubaud, Jacques
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, poet and mathematician and member of the Oulipo group
DATE OF BIRTH December 5, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Caluire-et-Cuire near Lyon