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| REVIEWS | BY JEFF SAWTELL |
 Poet Jacques Prevert  Jean Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Juliette Greco |
Like me, such people were reared to believe poetry is for sissies. Fortunately, it is not a chronic condition. There is a cure – listening to words about real life. Poetry is not meant to be read, but, said. Its origins are public rather than private – to be performed not perused. Sadly, we can’t always listen to the original and have to rely on the printed word. And this is doubly onerous when the text is foreign. Fortunately for French poet Jacques Prevert (1900-1977), we can refer to the sensitive translations of his poetry by Sarah Lawson. Even more importantly, we can compare them with the poetical realism of his screenplays for a series of films during the 1930s and 1940s. Prevert rejects the mushy Moon In June approach. He is a “surrealist of the street”, utilising a rhythm that echoes the sounds of the street: “Employed against my will by the factory of ideas/I refused to clock in/Likewise mobilised in the army of ideas/I deserted.” Many might remember Autumn Leaves recorded by Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis. Frank did it his way. Miles did the jazz way. It wasn’t Prevert’s way. Born in the middle-class suburbs of Paris, Prevert quickly learnt to mock the pretensions and obsessions of a class in the throes of decline. He joined the surrealists in the 1920s, only to leave, after disagreeing with the autocratic André Breton, to collaborate with the communist October Groupe. Performing in working class venues, they attended the International Workers’ Theatre Olympiad in Moscow for the premiere of his play The Battle of Fontenoy in 1935. He also collaborated with Jean Renoir on The Crime of Monsieur Lange and with Michel Carne on a series of films culminating in the amazing, Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945. Produced largely in secret under the Nazi occupation, it describes how a group of travelling entertainers and the people combine together against the exploiting classes. His first published poems, Paroles, in 1946 was to prove a lasting inspiration to the post-war generation of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Greco and Yves Montand. So much so, he has streets and schools named after him. Prevert created collages derived from newspapers, cabaret songs and scribblings on the backs of envelopes that were libertarian, satirical, anti-clerical and anti-militaristic. A worker at a factory gate rejoices in the glorious sunshine. “Say comrade Sun/don’t you think/that it’s a dead loss/to give a day like this/to the boss.” A man collapses in a florists and the shopkeeper doesn’t know what to reach for first – the fallen man, the fallen flowers or “the money that doesn’t stop rolling”. A student follows his heart and rubs out words, dates, names, phrases and “traps”, and instead, “on the “blackboard of sorrow he draws the face of happiness”. As for religion – “Our Father who art in heaven/Stay there.” And we’ll stay on earth “with the straw of destitution rotting in the steel of the cannons”. Poetry to blow your mind. “Two snails go off/To the funeral of a dead leaf. |
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