Francis Ponge 1899-?
biography
Ponge studied law in Paris and literature in Strausbourg. He had peripheral contacts with Surrealists in the late twenties and between the wars worked as an editor and journalist. Ponge joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was active during the war in organizing the Resistance movement among journalists. He broke with the Communists in 1947 and spent the following two years in Algeria. From 1952 to 1965 he was a professor at the Alliance Francais in Paris. Since then, he has given many lectures abroad. An article by Sartre in the early forties praising his work was instrumental in bringing Ponge to the public's attention. Francis Ponge was awarded the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.
In the prose poems of Francis Ponge, coming as he does in an un-heroic age fashioned more by scientific than by classical studies, the direction is down rather than up, smaller rather than larger. The subjects of his allegories or fables belong to a lower world than that of the gods and heroes of antiquity, and are treated zoomorphically, as opposed to the anthropomorphism of an Aesop or a La Fontaine. However, like his Renaissance antecedents, he too is creating a new humanism. He states his purpose to be "a description-definition-literary art work" which, avoiding the drabness of the dictionary and the inadequacy of poetic description, will lead to a cosmogony, that is, an account - through the successive and cumulative stages of linguistic development - of the totality of man's view of the universe and his relationship to it.
selected works in translation
The Making of the Pre' translated by Lee Fahnestock (University of Missouri Press, 1979)
The Voice of Things translated by Beth Archer (McGraw Hill, 1972)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
Vegetation translated by Lee Fahnstock (Red Dust, 1995)
writing
rhetoric
I assume we are talking about saving a few young men from suicide. I have in mind those who commit suicide out of disgust, because they find that others own too large a share of them. To them one should say: at least let the minority within you have the right to speak. Be poets. They will answer: but it is especially there, it is always there that i feel others within me; when i try to express myself, i am unable to do so. Words are readymade and express themselves: they do not express me. Once again i find myself suffocating. At that moment, teaching the art of resisting words becomes useful, the art of saying only what one wants to say, the art of doing them violence, of forcing them to submit. In short... Found a rhetoric, or rather, to teach everyone the art of founding his own rhetoric. This saves those few, those rare individuals who must be saved: those who are aware, and who are troubled and disgusted by the others within them.those individuals who make the mind progress, and who are, strictly speaking, capable of changing the reality of things.
the pleasures of the door
Kings do not touch doors.
They do not know that happiness: to push before them with kindness or rudeness one of these great familiar panels, to turn around towards it to put it back in place - to hold it in one's arms.
... The happiness of grabbing by the porcelain knot of its belly one of these huge single obstacles; this quick grappling by which, for a moment, progress is hindered, as the eye opens and the entire body fits into its new environment.
With a friendly hand he holds it a while longer before pushing it back decidely thus shutting himself in - of which, he, by the click of the powerful and well-oiled spring, is pleasantly assured.
For a visual intrepretation of Ponge's poem Rain, click here
return to the library
return to kicking giants