Works
In his work, Le parti pris des choses (often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay.
Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry. His principal aim was to avoid stereotypical thinking. In Le Grand Recueil (The Grand Collection), published in 1961 he explained his "concentration on simple objects – stones, grass, directed towards a restoration of the power and purity of language."
In 1967 he published his best-known work, Le Savon, translated as Soap (1969), a long prose poem that, in the words of The Times "is unique precisely because, and often very humorously, it exhausts the topic of the word and the thing." An extract from the original and the English translation, published in 1969 illustrate this:
Si je m'en frotte les mains, le savon écume, jubile...
Plus il les rend complaisantes, souples,
liantes, ductiles, plus il bave, plus
sa rage devient volumineuse et nacrée...
Pierre magique!
Plus il forme avec l'air et l'eau
des grappes explosives de raisins
parfumés...
L'eau, l'air et le savon
se chevauchent, jouent
à saute-mouton, forment des
combinaisons moins chimiques que
physiques, gymnastiques, acrobatiques...
Rhétoriques?
Translation by Lane Dunlop:
If I rub my hands with it, soap foams, exults...
The more complaisant it makes them, supple,
smooth,docile, the more it slobbers, the more
its rage becomes voluminous, pearly...
Magic stone!
The more it forms with air and water
clusters of scented grapes
explosive...
Water, air and soap
overlap, play
at leapfrog, form
combinations less chemical than
physical, gymnastical, acrobatical
Rhetorical?
Read more about this topic: Francis Ponge
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The family that perseveres in good works will surely have an abundance of blessings.”
—Chinese proverb.
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)