Whether he's strolling around his native Paris, or wandering the streets of Dublin, Jacques Réda sees everything with a crystal-sharp poetic vision, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC, Paris Correspondent
THE POET was struck by the city’s grinding poverty, corresponding as it did, back then, to the penury of his own flagging spirits. He saw beggars at every street corner and young girls selling roses by the Ha’penny Bridge. In fact, “the whole city seemed to be waiting for a handout”. This was Dublin, about 20 years ago, its provincial atmosphere a comfort to the poet with the “provincial soul” he owed to his childhood in Lunéville in eastern France.
From Dublin city centre, he took a train to the suburban fringe, a faceless everywhere “floating in a crystal light”. Night was drawing in, but he could still make out the urban furniture that clutters the route into every city in the world: hangars, factories, shopping centres and warehouses.
“And there remained this strip of wasteland, at the end of which moved the small black silhouettes of a man and his dog,” he writes. “It was at quite a distance, but I was certain the man was wearing a cap and that the dog was skipping about, and that they had but a faint idea of the narrowing of their space.”
He returned to the city, to the gates at St Stephen’s Green and the banks of the Liffey, where, apart from some new towers soaring over the river, “old Dublin has resisted reasonably well”, seeming “resolved not to yield a single brick”. It reminded him a little of the city of Nancy, and he digresses (“Do I have the right?” he asks his reader) to ruminate a little on the comparison. Dublin didn’t have any great monuments, as far as he could see, apart from the “majestic” GPO, where he spent some time watching and listening, though he didn’t need stamps that day.
On he walked to Grafton Street, “pitifully and adorably” a French Grand’Rue such as you’d find in Lunéville or any other provincial French city, only busier. He wandered past Bewleys and veered into a playful discussion on the (ample) merits of Irish pub food and the standard of wine served in Ireland. His thoughts shifted to the city’s history and to the Irish language. Then, abruptly, “I really needed socks”, so on he walked to “the vast aquarium” of St Stephen’s Green shopping centre. There were so many socks to choose from, and by now he was getting tired. “Did I really need socks?”
He bought some cigarettes – Sweet Afton, unfiltered – and had a chat with the suspicious woman behind the counter and he sat in a square in Temple Bar and watched some walkers passing by with their Saturday shopping. And then he kept walking.
These snapshots, taken from a rich account by Jacques Réda of a visit to Dublin 20 years ago – due to be published in a French journal in the coming months – will sound reassuringly familiar to readers of this pre-eminent French poet. He may find himself in an unfamiliar workshop, but the tools – the ceaseless wandering, the wistful digressions, the self-doubt, the virtuoso language and the constant juxtaposition of the high and low, the lofty and the mundane – are unmistakably Réda’s.
As the light draws in on a midweek evening, Réda – tall, sturdy, deep-voiced and laconic – is already in situin the cafe where we have agreed to meet, nursing his beer and throwing back some peanuts. We're here to fill in some gaps. The interview has been done by post over the previous week, my questions returned with a warm greeting and some carefully typewritten sheets containing his answers, one or two accompanied by scribbled amendments along the margins.
Also included is the new piece about Dublin, with a note to say he hopes it doesn’t offend my patriotism. And yet it’s clearly an affectionate portrait, I tell him. “It’s a sad city, isn’t it?” Réda replies with a playful grin. “I like it. There’s nothing very beautiful in Dublin . . . But I was born in the countryside. I spent my childhood in the country. I like that sort of atmosphere.”
He has been back to Ireland more recently and knows well how much has changed, and how little. What stayed with him on his first visit to the west, 20 years ago, was the image of “mountains falling into the sea”; more recently, it was the proliferation of new houses. “You felt that all of a sudden, something had happened: a sudden prosperity had come.”
BORN IN 1929, Réda has published about 30 works of poetry and prose, and was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix in 1993 for a lifetime's work. He first made his name as a writer on jazz (he rejects the term "jazz critic", protesting that he is "neither a musician nor a musicologist") and served as editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française(NRF) from 1987 to 1995. Réda's first three major books of poetry, Amen, Récitatifand La Tourne(published between 1968 and 1975), arrived during the period of experimentation that followed the demise of surrealism and engaged political poetry, anticipating the "new lyricism" that was to gain momentum in the 1980s.
Réda has lived in Paris since 1953, and his chronicling of the city's landscape is one of the recurring features of his work. The French term flâneuris often applied to him, though he prefers circulation. After all, "the real flâneur is someone who has their head in the clouds, who stops everywhere, who has no objective. That's not really my temperament," he says. And yet Réda seems forever on the move: setting off, stopping, beginning afresh. His gaze is constantly being drawn, whether by a beautiful 19th century building, an elegant shopfront, or, as in his prose-poem The Ruins of Paris, "by a sky as incomprehensible as the approach of love". As Jennie Feldman, a translator of his poetry, has noted, the realistic tone of Réda's work has been credited with helping to "ground" tendencies to lyrical flightiness, and in contrast to the abstract form of expression found in much modern French poetry, there is a sharp visual instinct at work. He has said that many of his poems originated in a single stubborn image of something seen or imagined: a woman selling wool, a reflection in a puddle, a beggar on a street corner.
Réda’s vantage point is often that of a face lost in the crowd, marvelling at the ordinary or the nondescript – bottles lying in the gullies, “singing colossi of roses” or “olive trees in grand conversation/calmly smoking in the sun” – as the world barges past.
“I was never as happy as I was when I wandered slowly on the backroads of the French countryside,” he remarks. And yet the urban street has so often been his muse. “A crowd is a collection of individuals, and each individual is an atom of that crowd,” he says. “I don’t enjoy crowds that come together out of necessity, like on public transport at rush hour . . . but I don’t dislike wandering around in a crowd that has merely this wandering around as its purpose, for example during the summer, on the banks of the Seine, or a Sunday on Grafton Street.”
Just as Réda dislikes the term “jazz critic” (“I wrote as an amateur rather than a critic,” he says. “I couldn’t be a critic. It would be as if I said I was a photography critic, and I couldn’t take a photo”), he also denies a link between his interests in poetry and music. “Everyone has something like that,” he says. “You like eggs and a certain woman. What’s the connection between the two? You are the connection.” But his poetry is undeniably musical, its rhythms playful and free. He makes the language dance, says poet and literary critic Jean-Michel Maulpoix, by playing on syllables like a pianist and by exploiting the rhythmic potential of the variable, “pneumatic” mute “e” at the end of French words. Elsewhere, the debt to jazz is more explicit: titles borrowed from Duke Ellington or, as one critic has observed, the recurrence of the colour blue to describe nature’s most potent moments.
ON HIS WALKS around Paris and its suburbs, Réda would often bring a small camera with him. “When I used to walk around Paris a lot, I’d take photos, taking pictures of things that were disappearing, or of details – old shops, say. I just wanted to have them to remind me.”
He acknowledges that “there is always a slice of nostalgia” and that “the way of life that I knew is long gone”, but he gently steers away from a question on how the city has changed, other than to remark on how exorbitant rents are pushing people further out. “The historic centre can’t disappear – perhaps if there was a war, it could – but at the same time it loses something. There are fewer people who live within it. It could be like Venice someday.”
Although he seems in good health and his curiosity remains undimmed, Réda writes less than he once did. “As you get older, you have less to say. You have less desire, less passion. You start to care a little less.” He laughs again.
We talk about whether his preoccupations have changed much over the years; he doesn’t think so – after all, “it’s difficult to transform oneself completely”. And then he checks himself, and that self-questioning reflex returns. “But then what I think about myself is not interesting. I’d inevitably be mistaken. You, too, could be mistaken, but perhaps it would be more interesting.”
With our glasses empty and the cafe filling up, the conversation returns to Ireland. He’s looking forward to seeing Cork for the first time, and to strolling around Dublin once again, when he visits later this month. If we’ve forgotten anything, he says as we leave, “don’t worry, you can always just come up with something yourself,” and the wry grin reappears.
He has someone to meet at the Gare de Lyon. And so, with a firm handshake, he makes for the door and moves off into the crowd.
Jacques Réda will appear at the Franco-Irish Literary Festival, devoted this year to the theme of the city, which takes place in Dublin from April 16–18. See francoirishliteraryfestival.com
