Souffle de Perse No. 15
Book Review

par Antoine Raybaud

Renée Ventresque
The "Pléiade" by Saint-John Perse – La Poésie contre l'Histoire

Classiques Garnier,
collection STUDIES AND LITERATURE OF XX XXI CENTURIES
N ° 15, 442 pages ; 24 x 16 cm ; Paperback ;
ISBN 978-2-8124-0224-1 ; EAN 9782812402241

Quel allant ! What a breath ! What constancy of happiness(s) expression, on such a composite record, searching, to classify, organizing, to unify ! I also imagine the time, perseverance, and attention it took for Renée Ventresque for inventory, inspect all components, ici ou là, then group the, evaluate, last call as it does, with such firmness and clarity, As shades also, account tenu de sa diversity (or disparity), while measuring continuously, avec justice, and that it also had a suitable background and irreverent tone (Chinese file !), its monument character, both preparation and creation.

And Renée Ventresque emphasizes that it is the "Pleiades" Saint-John Perse, not the Saint-John Perse of "Pleiades", with its share of manufacturing, but also the shadow, I mean : the projected light, constitutive, the work itself has been fundamentally poetic work (cf. epigraphs pages 159 : "He sent me a letter by the people of the coast. […] This is his letter. It is a wise. And my answer is this : […]. This is my letter trudging ", or 279 : « […] speaking, speaking language aubain among men of my blood, […] the golden gates of some slivered Chancellery " ; or the chapter "Briand, avatar du 'Prince' », etc.). This work is necessarily to become his tireless worker and inquiring eyes in this area, which can not interrogate his life in this span, the major form.

There has to be assessed much as anything that makes the eyes of Renée Ventresque widens a strictly literary reflection, not to mention it adds to the consideration of biographical data of the study Winds, for example, according to his own work.

It recalls, rightly, we first forced the hand of Saint-John Perse for what he called "filler", pushing it into the double track memories - more or less like the makers or sniffer History (otherwise, him, in primary acteur) that add their witness to world history - and his conversational talent, that is to say, fascinating monologue, he exercised especially on American ears, but also on those of Pierre Guerre eg, fed deeds and spicy "curiosities". That Saint-John Perse was always, hitherto, strictly separated from his poetry.

But, to conclude, maybe I would question as, when accessing the "great age", the trend that you can come on later, to what I would call the thought of Twilight : which grows, together shadows, the memories of the day, its splendor, emotions, its successes, the memory of what might have missed ; where we try to make sense of everything, especially what has petered, or fails. Incomplete connections, political acts that have not resulted, dips or inverse acuities, so to say, Exile, as soon as he began to assemble it all, a hodgepodge, asked, at the same time they drew, the outline of a sense.