Jean Tardieu's poetry has an almost child-like simplicity, and in France
his work is studied both in universities and in primary schools. Yet
while he is a household name in France and has been translated into most
European languages, his poetry remains little known in the
English-speaking world, despite its immediacy and sense of fun. Tardieu
is a writer of enormous range, and his poetry addresses problems of
experience and language central to modern literature, bringing lively
wit and humour to bear upon an anguished interrogation of the world. His
father was a successful painter and his mother an accomplished musician,
and his fascination with the art of the writer on the one hand, and
paintings and music on the other, is another constant presence in his
work. Tardieu was born in 1903, and this selection spans 80 years of his
writing. In his early years the difficulties of writing lyric poetry in a
schizophrenic age led him to a multiplication of poetic voices, and so
to working for the stage, and he was writing what was subsequently
dubbed Theatre of the Absurd before Beckett's and Ionesco's plays had
ever been performed in public. He died in 1995. This selection includes
the sequence Space and the Flute (1958), which Tardieu wrote for
drawings by his friend Pablo Picasso. Their poems and drawings are
reproduced together in this edition.
