Nioque of the Early-Spring

Poetry. Translated from the French by Jonathan Larson. On the 50th anniversary of its publication, The Song Cave is honored to publish the first English translation of Francis Ponge's NIOQUE OF THE EARLY-SPRING. Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its first publication in Paris, May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.

April is not always the cruelest month. In these stray notations dated early April 1950, Ponge provides a latter-day version of Stravinsky's 'Sacre du printemps' or of William Carlos Williams' 'Spring and All'--a vernal enactment of all the resurrectional energies of a spring-time-to-come, as witnessed firsthand at the farmhouse of 'La Fleurie' in southern France. When subsequently published in Tel Que in May 1968, eighteen years later, Ponge's rural, pastoral text now acquired a specific urban history and Utopianism, its Lucretian 'Nioque, ' or gnosis, now speaking to the gnomic revolutionary slogans of the Left Bank barricades: 'Be realistic, demand the impossible, ' 'Beneath the cobblestones, the beach.' Jonathan Larson's careful engagement with Ponge manages to seize what is most prosaic about his poetry--its fierce communism of the ordinary, its insistence that taking the part of things means taking words at their most etymological everydayness.--Richard Sieburth

This startlingly fresh and necessary document of the 1950s by Francis Ponge comes to us via the all too rare feat of true poetic reenactment. Understanding that each poet creates language anew, Jonathan Larson has found a poetics suitable for the occasion of Ponge's own poetic logic In this rendering, Larson's absolute care and attention to syllabic weight and measure, to the syntax and length of each line as it unwinds, allows us--as readers--to come into the drama of a text newly made, in other words, to discover a new poem in its very making. Yet, none of this comes at the cost of accuracy or through the subjugation of the original at the hands of one wielding the imperial language This is no mean feat in this day and age and, by way of Larson's exquisite ear, we are again given the poignancy and urgency of Ponge's own moment.--Ammiel Alcalay

Author: Francis Ponge
Publisher: Song Cave
Published: 05/01/2018
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.40h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780998829036


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/03/2018

About the Author
Ponge, Francis: - Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was born in Montpellier, France, and is most famously the author of The Voice of Things (1942), Soap (1967), and The Making of the Prairie (1971). During the Second World War, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly newspaper L'Action. He famously countered Surrealism's fixation on the marvelous with a denuded objectivity, and went on to become one of the most influential French poets of the 20th Century. His 1942 book Le parti pris des choses is considered a literary classic. For the last 20 years of his life Ponge was reclusive, living at his country house in Le Bar-sur-Loup, where he died at the age of 89.

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