Saturday, March 28, 2009
BeauregardPhilippe Jaccottet is described by Roger Cardinal in the Oxford Companion to Literature in French as follows. 'Swiss by birth, Jaccottet settled in a French village in the Drôme, a region of wooded hills and mountainous prospects from which he derives a landscape poetry of non-specific and universal resonance. ... Trees and birds, rain and snow, moon and stars are the archetypal features of a world dense with intimations of harmony and transfiguration. Inspired by Hölderlin, Rilke and Ungaretti, each of whom he has translated, Jaccottet celebrates those rare moments of participatory insight when contingent phenomena, lyrically voiced, accede to the status of metaphor or metaphysical symbol.'
Beauregard (1981) is a set of five prose pieces, the first of which was inspired by the poet's chance discovery of a remote, 'insignificant' village, in the Drôme called Beauregard. I read it in the
Bloodaxe translation by Mark Treharne, who describes Beauregard as a collection of 'landscapes in prose', 'place reassembled as text.' Jaccottet writes of both the physical setting and his own interior landscape, something Treharne sees as inevitable - 'endemic in the whole business of inscribing landscape in the referential system of words'. However, the approach is something particularly associated with certain poets: Eugenio Montale for example (whose writing on the Cinque Terra I have described
here before). Jaccottet cites Montale's poem Tempi di Bellosguardo in his own poem - they both contain 'the same word'.I found Mark Treharne's general introduction to Jaccottet interesting, touching as it does on some of the difficulties of dealing with landscape in the arts today. Here are some of the points made in it:
Jaccottet elected to live in the Drôme to avoid distractions, not to write regional verse or nature poetry. The landscape provides 'a point of focus for sensory, affective and meditative response.'
His poetry represents attentiveness pushed to its limits. But 'scrutiny should not be too intense, too keen for the capture, or it will kill its object.'
The eyes, according to Jaccottet, drink in the world and 'contribute to its metamorphosis into immaterial images.' In his poetry, 'objects become images and ultimately figures of language.'
But landscape is not just a static image, it changes constantly and Jaccottet reflects this (particularly the play of light and seasonal change).
One of Jaccottet's prose works is called Paysages avec figures absentes, which sounds like a collection of landscape paintings that have lost their 'figures' (in connection with this, see my
earlier post on artworks entitled 'Landscape with...') In this, he describes intense encounters with a landscape that sound like epiphanies, but is reluctant to make too much of them. 'Occasionally, as if our movements had crossed - like the encounter of two glances that can create a flash of illumination and open up another world - I have thought I had glimpsed what I should have to call the still centre of the moving world. Too much said? Better to move on...'
As a modern landscape poet, Jaccottet finds it important to stress the distance between nature and human cycles: 'landscape can appear ordinary and familiar, but also alien, full of uneasy distances, a foreign language.'
Finally, the introduction to the Bloodaxe translation begins with discussion of a brief poem that contemplates the sight of snow on a mountain. It is from Airs: poèms 1961-64, a collection inspired by haiku. The poem is an 'enigmatic verbal landscape' - its lack of detail leaves the reader unsure how specific or real it is. For Treharne, 'the laconic style provokes an involvement with the poem that a more explicit formulation would not have done.'
Looking down to Painswick from Sanatorium Road. The sanatorium was a hospital now long demolished George Orwell was a patient there after writing '1984' and maybe saw this view as he travelled down the Lane . Yewricks can also be seen under its green canopy on the ancient Mill Lane.
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Cranham Mill on Mill Lane painted on a June morning. Low cast shadows from the sun just rising above the ancient woods and hitting the Mill Race making it shine. The Mill is a sprawling set of cream stone buildings. The painting was undertaken above the Mill and the Mill race. Noisy ducks and their 6 perfect ducklings which attached themselves to my boot laces helped me work. A wood pecker hammered close by whilst swans enjoyed the Mill pond. A tranquil English haven.
Next week looks exciting Manuel Casa Blanca the Portugese painter has been very helpfull and has been able to finalise details. We are meeting at a wonderful location next Friday at Montemor o Novo near Evora. 
This Cotswold Stone House stands in the morning shadows, early in June on Sanatorium Rd Cranham which follows the contours of a broad wooded ridge. Both houses and farm sit across the lane from a unique species of ancient beechwood which encircles the whole village. In the middle ages Cranham lay on the Gloucester - London Road. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are said to have hunted in the woods.
The second in the Cranham series. Here the view is across the greenest of vales, down and over Mill Lane. Buttercups flood the field with bright colour flying like little yellow flags above the palest of greens. In the distance is the deep wood above Cranham Common. All is still but for my brush and the twitch of the cattle's tails. All is quiet except the rook chatter, painting sounds and bee drone.
The first of a series of watercolours as a continuation and second stage to the Cranham Sketches undertaken in June 2009.This one is from a drawing I did early one morning looking down the Lane just past Yewriks. The lane forms a tunnel with high dark banks of leaves, rabbits burrow here without care and the tunnel is full of the twitter and chatter of birds. Its a natural organic place were England's rural beauty is well preserved and thriving.
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