Il lui a été décerné le Prix national de poésie (1988) ainsi que le Grand Prix de poésie (2010) de l’Académie française.īorn in 1927 in the small southern French town of Privas, JACQUES DUPIN has lived in Paris since 1944.
Avec André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Leiris, Gaëtan Picon, Louis-René des Forêts, et Paul Celan, il a fondé et dirigé, à partir de 1966, la revue L’Éphémère. À partir de 1952, il travaille pour la revue Cahiers d’art, faisant connaissance avec de nombreux artistes comme Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Victor Brauner, Wilfredo Lam, Alexander Calder, Jean Hélion, Georges Braque, Nicolas De Staël, Joan Miró et Alberto Giacometti.ĭepuis les années cinquante, Dupin a une importante présence au sein de la poésie française, ainsi que du monde d’art contemporain il est critique d’art - c’est en particulier un spécialiste de Miró -, rédacteur de catalogues, conservateur et commissaire d’expositions, et également responsable des éditions de la Galerie Maeght (entre 1955 et 1988). Son premier recueil de poésie, Cendrier du voyage (GLM, 1950), est préfacé par René Char. Né en 1927 à Privas dans le sud de la France, JACQUES DUPIN vit à Paris depuis 1944.
The English padding must remain very discreet and retain some of this dense, bony harshness - which can also be humorous! Its special music derives from abrupt internal rhymes and jagged rhythms.
In contrast to his poetic prose, Dupin’s verse is especially succinct, even skeletal. The task of the translator facing Dupin’s work is not easy. Sometimes adding a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb helps to multiply meanings in English, a language that normally eschews polysemy and prefers to select a single shade of meaning. No given poem therefore expresses a single theme, but rather coexistent ones they range from writing and painful childhood memories (notably involving the poet’s mother) to death, war, and sexual desire. In such cases, two or three meanings are valid and function simultaneously. A given line comprising “ feuille” will be interpreted differently if the reader construes the word as “leaf,” “(manuscript) page,” or “piece of paper.” “ Éclat” can be an equivalent of “sparkle,” “burst,” “explosion,” even “shell fragment” or “shrapnel.” When Dupin evokes an “ avalanche de soie” in Of Flies and Monkeys, the “ soie” will be read as “silk” and perhaps heard as “self.” In Mothers, “ vis sans fin” refers to a technical object (a “worm screw mechanism”) but also, phonetically, to “endless vice.” Dupin uses the French “ vers” as both “worms” and “verse,” and he has encouraged me to render the word as “verse-worms.” Words such as “ feuille,” “ éclat,” “ soif,” “ bord,” “ (se) jeter,” or “ souffle” create meanings that are at once rich, even sometimes supersaturated, and not entirely determinate in that it is presented in a process of becoming, of blossoming.
His poems ironically transform well-worn expressions and rely on key polysemous terms. These characteristics are especially true of his verse. They suggest potential narratives that are left untold, willingly verge on what he calls “illegibility,” and appear “cubist” in their juxtaposition of fragments and rejection of natural or logical transitions.ĭupin’s verse is especially succinct, even skeletal. Often conjuring up a primitive or, more precisely, nascent state of being in which sensations, sentiments, perceptions, thoughts, and acts are depicted as emerging before language categorizes and conceptualizes them, Dupin’s stark poems and prose poems foster paradoxes.