Jacques Prévert – the Poet of Everyday Life E-Book

Dieter Hoffmann

• Herausgeber: LiteraturPlanet
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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).

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