Philippe Jaccottet | |
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| Philippe Jaccottet | |
_by_Erling_Mandelmann_-_2.jpg) Jaccottet in 1991 | |
| Born | 30 June 1925 Moudon, Switzerland |
| Died | 24 February 2021 (aged 95) Grignan, France |
| Writing career | |
| Language | French |
Philippe Jaccottet (French: [filip ʒakotɛ]; 30 June 1925 – 24 February 2021) was a Swiss-born Francophone poet and translator.
After completing his studies in Lausanne, he lived for several years in Paris. In 1953, he moved to the town of Grignan in Provence. He translated numerous authors and poets into French, including Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Mandelstam, Góngora, Leopardi, Musil, Rilke, Homer and Ungaretti. He was awarded the German international Petrarca-Preis in 1988 for his poetry. In addition to poetry and the novel L'Obscurité (Gallimard, 1961), he is known for his prose writings on music and art, and the notebooks that he published regularly beginning in 1963 under the title La Semaison (seedtime, referring to the seasonal dispersion of seeds).
In 2014, Philippe Jaccottet became the fifteenth living author to be published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. After Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Cendrars and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, he was the fourth Swiss author to be published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
He was married in 1953 to the Franco-Swiss painter and illustrator Anne-Marie Jaccottet (b. 26 July 1931, née Haesler). Reproductions of her watercolors and sketches appeared in the volume of his poetry translated into English by Cid Corman in Breathings (Mushinsha Imprint for Grossman Publishers, 1974).
Jaccottet worked with other artists to create limited edition volumes of his work, including Pierre Tal-Cot in À travers un verger (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975) and Zao Wou-Ki in Beauregard (Paris: Maeght, 1981).
His poetry has been characterized as one of "nuance and attenuation" and as moving between "a feeling for the leverage of precise limits and at the same time a yearning, nostalgia, for the illimitably open." The Irish poet Derek Mahon, who translated a selected edition of Jaccottet's poetry from 1953 to 1983, described in his introduction the "intensely visual" quality of the work, and compared it to that of writers as diverse as John Keats, Rilke, Paul Éluard, Samuel Beckett, and W. S. Merwin (who also translated Jaccottet). Translators and critics also note its resemblance to the work of Francis Ponge and its phenomenological discipline.
Jaccottet died in Grignan, France, in February 2021 at the age of 95.
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