Bøger af Philippe Jaccottet

The second volume of notes and reflections from one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of letters. One of Europe's finest contemporary poets, Jaccottet is a writer of exacting attention. Through keen observations of the natural world, art, literature, and music, and reflections on the human condition, Jaccottet opens his readers' eyes to the transcendent in everyday life. The Second Seedtime is a collection of "things seen, things read, and things dreamed." The volume continues the project Jaccottet began three decades earlier in his first volume of notebooks, Seedtime. Here, again, he gathers flashes of beauty dispersed around him like seeds that may blossom into poems or moments of inspiration. He returns, insistently, to such literary touchstones as Dante, Montaigne, Góngora, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Brontë, and Dickinson, as well as musical greats including Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell, and Schubert. The Second Seedtime is the vivid chronicle of one man's passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit, and the natural world.

The first volume of notes and reflections from one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of letters. Seedtime--Jaccottet's notebooks--is an especially good introduction to this leading francophone Swiss author, containing the poet's observations of the natural world and his reflections on literature, art, music, and the human condition. In these explorations, he returns again and again to the fundamental, focusing his prodigious talents on describing the exact shade of light on a meadow, the sound of running water, the color of cherry and almond blossoms, or the cry of a bird in the stillness before dawn. In this translation by Tess Lewis, English readers will finally be able to join this poet as we follow in his footsteps of fifty years ago and find the still-viable seeds of his delicate and tenacious verse.

'A la lumiere d'hiver' is a central work in the writing of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). Tim Dooley's translation, 'In Winter Light', is the product of a long relationship with the original, which he first read in 1977. His English version mirrors the tentative, scrupulous exploration of being he finds in Jaccottet's French.

Philippe Jaccottet is one of a group of poets who turned away from the Surrealists' sometimes abstruse experiments with form in favor of a muted lyrical expression born of a quasi-fraternal bonding with the wonder of earth, light, water, sky. This lyricism is steeped in an ambiguous sense of our planet's vulnerability in this nuclear age. Jaccottet's work has now developed steadily over nearly four decades as Derek Mahon points out in his introductory essay. In themes and form it will not seem alien to English language readers, yet Jaccottet's voice is his own. The sensuous modulations of imagery, harmony, and mood are strangely moving and haunt the imagination.

A meditation on the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and its power to evoke a complexity of emotions and astonishment. In The Pilgrim's Bowl, Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet examines Giorgio Morandi's ascetic still lifes, contrasting his artistic approach to the life philosophies of two authors whom he cherished, Pascal and Leopardi, and reflecting on the few known autobiographical details we know about Morandi. In this small and erudite tome, Jaccottet draws us into the very heart of the artist's calm and strangely haunting oeuvre. In his literary criticism, Jaccottet is known for deeply engaging with the work of his fellow poets and tenaciously seeking the essence of their poetics. In this, his only book-length essay devoted to an artist, his critical prose likewise blends empathy, subtle discernment, and a determination to pinpoint, or at least glimpse, the elusive underlying qualities of Morandi's deceptively simple, dull-toned yet mysteriously luminous paintings. The Pilgrim's Bowl is a remarkably elucidating study based on a profound admiration for and a dialogue with Morandi's oeuvre.

The last works of the last great classic European poet now available in English. In his 96th and final year, and with the help of the poet José-Flore Tappy, celebrated Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet finished two manuscripts-in-progress, one in prose and one in poetry, both of which are presented in this volume in John Taylor's sensitive translation. The first work, "La Clarté Notre-Dame," takes off from the "pure, weightless, fragile, yet crystal-clear tinkling" of a monastery bell heard during a walk with friends. With this thought-provoking sound as a leitmotiv, Jaccottet looks back on a life of writing, reading, and scrutinizing humankind's existential and spiritual aspirations. He sets these concerns against his equally lifelong preoccupation with "the rise of evil in today's world," notably in Syria. Composed in a baroque style, the verse poems collected in "The Last Book of Madrigals" explore love. Jaccottet returns in spirit to Italy, the country which for him symbolizes happiness and sensuality. As he evokes amorous attraction, he conjures up Monteverdi's madrigals, one of Dante's little-known rhymes, and Giuseppe Ungaretti's last poem. Reinventing and commenting on these works, Jaccottet meditates on old age, approaching death, despair, and the persistence of love. Together, both works grapple with devastating darkness, but as Tappy observes in her afterword, however, Jaccottet's "greatest force" was "his perpetually renewed desire, during the most terrifying night, to head for the light."

Philippe Jaccottet‿s newest work follows in some ways the approach of Seedtime, his recent two-volume collection of notebooks. Similarly comprising on-the-spot jottings, philosophical reflections, literary commentary, dream narratives and sundry “notes,â€? this book nonetheless differs from the preceding volumes in that the Swiss poet includes more personal material than ever before. Drawing on unpublished notebooks from the years 1952‿2005, Jacottet offers here passages about his family, the death of his father-in-law and of his mother, his encounters with other major poets‿such as René Char, Francis Ponge, Jean Tardieu, and his friends Yves Bonnefoy and André du Bouchet‿and his trips abroad, as well as, characteristically, his walks in the countryside around the village of Grignan, in the south of France, where he has lived since 1953. For a poet who has been notoriously discreet about his life, this book offers unexpected glimpses of the private man. Above all, the entries in this notebook show how one of the greatest European poets grapples with the discouraging elements of existence, counterbalancing them by recording fleeting perceptions in which “something else,â€? almost like a threshold, seems present. Â

'I have now given shape, though clumsily-so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this-to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.'-Philippe JaccottetPhilippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after René Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard's Pléiade list while still living and working. "Truinas, April 21, 2001" is Jaccottet's meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, André du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet's funeral - 'an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet's house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts-scruples-about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.' - John Taylor

A collection of travel writings by the Swiss-French poet that takes him through war-torn parts of the Middle East, where he attends to scenes of faith and history that often go unremarked amid the turmoil.

Philippe Jaccottet's poetry is meditative, immediate and sensuous, rooted in the Drome region of south-east France, which gives it a rich sense of place. This book brings together his reflections on landscape in the prose pieces of Beauregard (1980) and in the poems of Under Clouded Skies (1983), two thematically linked collections.