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- Herausgeber: LiteraturPlanet
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Jacques Prévert is a poetic icon in France today, his poems are part of the school curriculum. Given the poet's deliberate distance from high culture and notably from traditional school education, this is not devoid of irony. The present eBook sketches a portrait of the poet in five chapters. In each chapter, English adaptations of selected works by Prévert serve as an introduction to individual aspects of his work.
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Dieter Hoffmann:
Jacques Prévert – the Poet of Everyday Life
A Portrait Based on Selected Poems
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About this book:
Jacques Prévert is a poetic icon in France today, his poems are part of the school curriculum. Given the poet's deliberate distance from high culture and notably from traditional school education, this is not devoid of irony.
The present eBook sketches a portrait of the poet in five chapters. In each chapter, English adaptations of selected works by Prévert serve as an introduction to individual aspects of his work.
Information about Dieter Hoffmann can be found on his website (rotherbaron.com) and on Wikipedia.
Cover picture: Photo of Jacques Prévert (1920s); photographer unknown; Paris, Musée Carnavalet (Lookandlearn.com)
Liberating the Mind from the Corset of School. Jacques Prévert's Poetic Criticism of the Traditional School System
For Jacques Prévert, school was – also from his own experience – more of an obstacle than a catalyst for the free spirit. His poems therefore repeatedly call for turning away from the traditional understanding of education.
Harold Copping (1863 – 1932): The Dunce (1886)
Bournemouth, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum (Wikimedia Commons)
The Dunce (Le cancre)
Below him
the parted heads
of the model students,
in front of him
the lurking gaze
of the teacher.
The fusillades of questions
rain down on him,
he staggers
in the hail of bullets of problems
that are not his own.
But suddenly
the bright madness laughs
through his gloomy face.
He reaches for the sponge
and simply wipes it away,
the labyrinth of facts and figures,
of data and terms,
of phrases and formulas,
and under the cheering of the class arena
he paints over in rainbow colours
the dark board of unhappiness
with the radiant face of happiness.
Jacques Prévert: Le cancre
from: Paroles (1946)
Prévert's Difficult Childhood
Looking at the biography of the French poet Jacques Prévert (1900 – 1977), some might be inclined to say that this author did not exactly imbibe poetry with his mother's milk.
Prévert's father had to eke out a living with odd jobs for a long time before he finally found work with a charity association in Paris [1]. In the jungle of the big city, the son fell into the petty crime milieu, so that Prévert himself later wondered about the "virginity" of his criminal record [2]. In all this, school was nothing more than an annoying evil, and skipping lessons consequently led to leaving school as early as possible (at the age of 15).
Critical View of Traditional School Education
If someone had asked Prévert how he could become a poet with this limited formal education, the answer would probably have been that this had happened not despite, but rather because of his distance from the school system. Thus, for example, he argued against the standardisation of intellectual progress that lockstep learning in school entails.
According to Prévert, to say that a child does not progress in school often overlooks the other developments that a child undergoes, which are not measured by school tests and may not even be related to instruction [3]. With the French philosopher Montaigne, Prévert therefore criticizes the "imprisonment" of the child's mind in school, where it is at the mercy of the whims of a bad-tempered teacher and thus deprived of its individual potential [4].
With the Bird of Imagination against Intellectual Paternalism
In Le cancre – the poem reproduced above –, a pupil rebels against the mental oppression by wiping away all the abstract facts and figures he is supposed to learn from the blackboard and painting them over with the "face of happiness".
Analogously, in Page d'écriture (Task Sheet), the conditions for mental freedom are created preciselyby the fact that the pupils turn away from the teacher's repetition exercises and devoting themselves to the bird of imagination, whose song causes the walls of the classroom – and thus the school reality – to collapse:
Arithmetic Exercise (Page d'écriture)
Two plus two makes four
plus four makes eight
which makes the same
when multiplied by two
minus four makes four again
a tightly woven arithmetic chain
round the numbers round the heads
on accurately demarcated squares
suddenly
out of the blue
a trembling feather
a bird's feather in front of the window
gliding past the classroom
gliding into the hearts
an unpredictable song
breaking the tightly woven chain
round the numbers round the heads
into countless spiritual sparks
a sea of colourful marbles
incalculably glittering
freed
the pencil dives into it.
And the numbers turn into objects again
the glass panes turn into sand
the ink turns into water
the desks turn back into trees
the chalk becomes a chalk rock
and the pencil a bird [5].
The "Unchained" Child as a Public Nuisance
Another poem by Prévert about childhood and traditional education is Chasse à l'enfant (Child Hunt / Hunt for the Child).
