Ponge, Francis

I knew nothing of how Francis Ponge's poetry had been presented to Anglo-Saxon readers until I was unexpectedly given Lee Fahnestock's translations of his The Nature of Things and Vegetation. My immediate reaction was: Lee Fahnestock must certainly be "Ponge's voice in English". Several rereadings, and a comparison with the French originals, confirmed this opinion.

Ponge was the first modern poet to be moved to imagine the inner nature of objects - "things". Things animal - vegetable - mineral. Snails - moss - pebbles. Ponge's imagination delves into the very being of the objects, he sees how even the most apparently insignificant of them is an integral part of the world we know, he shows us how the nature of inanimate things is intricately linked to all things animate, to all of us human beings. He made it his lifelong task to use his fastidious felling for words and language to make strange and beautiful poetry out of his vision.

To represent this unusual view in another language, it is evident that the translator must have a deep empathy with the original visionary, and it is clear that this empathy was what urged Lee Fahnestock to make these poems wider known. Ponge's poetic intentions may seem very serious - and they are - but he expresses seriousness in a joyous, often insouciant style, full of humor, lighthearted word play, puns, alliteration, allusions, imaginative contrasts. And I feel that this unique combination has be reproduced with love and understanding by Lee Fahnestock. She gives us Ponge's tones, rhythms, humor. She has maneuvered his word play with respect and unostentatious discretion; she knows how to read between the lines. Here, to my mind, is indeed Ponge in English.

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Selected Poems
Francis Ponge
Manufacturer: Wake Forest University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

The Nature of Things (French Series)
Soap (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson
Vegetation (French Series)
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories

ASIN: 0916390586

Ponge composed mostly in prose poems, and with his direct, precise language, he should be the easiest of foreign poets to translate. He is, however, one of the most difficult, because his 'direct' and 'precise' vocabulary is anything but - like Joyce, Ponge scrapes the banalities from words, and forces us to reconsider the exact meanings of them, their etymologies and implications. This can transform or complicate the poems' meaning completely, but as French words have a different versatility to English ones, the linguistic subtlety isn't always apparent in translation.

this makes the achievement of the three translaters here, all poets, the more admirable, as they catch much of Ponge's rhythmic, tonal and playful art. The poems themselves are marvels of revelation, recreating everyday objects like they never before existed, as the poet journeys through language into their usually ignored essence. You emerge determined to be more observant in future, to be more receptive to life.

“. . . And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is a little piece of soap. Well handled, we guarantee it will be enough. Let us hold this magic stone.”

The poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) occupied a significant and unchallenged place in French letters for over fifty years, attracting the attention and admiration of generations of leading intellectuals, writers, and painters, a notable feat in France, where reputations are periodically reassessed and undone with the arrival of new literary and philosophical schools.

Soap occupies a crucial, pivotal position in Ponge’s work. Begun during the German occupation when he was in the Resistance, though completed two decades later, it determined, according to Ponge, the form of almost all his postwar writing. With this work, he began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem which incorporates a laboratory or workshop, recounting its own process of coming into being along with the final result. The outcome is a new form of writing, which one could call “processual poetry.” Ponge’s later work, from Soap on, is a very important tool in the questioning and rethinking of literary genres, of poetry and prose, of what is literature.

There is a blurring of boundaries between Soap and soap (which was hard to come by during the Resistance and is also, of course, metaphorical for a larger social restitution). Soap contains the sum of Ponge’s aesthetics and materialist ethics and his belief in the supremacy of language as it becomes the object of the text. In the words of Serge Gavronsky, “this work, perhaps one of the longest running metaphors in literature, slowly unwinds, bubbles in verbal inventions, and finally evaporates, leaving the water slightly troubled, slightly darker, but the hands clean, really clean. . . . Out of murky literary habits, Ponge has devised a way of cleaning his text, and through it, man himself, his vocabulary, and as a consequence, his way of being in the world.”