Philippe Jaccottet: Poems and notebooks of a poet who spoke softly

Philippe Jaccottet, the Swiss poet and translator who passed away in 2021, is remembered for a distinctive literary voice that spoke "slowly (softly, low)" in its pursuit of precision and ethereality. His writings, whether poems or prose, aimed not to transcend moments but to isolate them in their unique singularity, capturing fleeting instances of light or chance encounters.

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From nothing. That is my law. Everything else: distant smoke.

Jaccottet's notebooks, which he named "La semaison" (The Sowing), served as a collection of exceptionally common phenomena. Within these pages, he meticulously recorded tangible observations while simultaneously pursuing an intangible resonance. Described as almost timid in his attentiveness, his work embraced a pastoral, porous quality, surrendering to the "innocence of perception" and the "ingenuity of translation."

His approach involved a delicate re-reading of the visible, registering specific flowers or concentrated mountains with a light touch. Jaccottet engaged in a constant push and pull to fix a color, not as flat planes but as a cross of tonalities, or to etch a shadow. His writing explored chromatic and climatic episodes, shifts in light, dissipations, and premonitions, all rendered with a spartan craftsmanship.

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To feel like a grain of a very old plant whose root can no longer be seen.

He often felt like "a grain of a very old plant whose root can no longer be seen," reflecting an asceticism devoid of embellishment. Yet, his descriptions could evoke a "bowl of mist." Jaccottet's work is characterized by its "apuntes" or notes, often feeling like first drafts. He felt compelled to examine "the secret law of appearance," a phrase he borrowed from Gerard Manley Hopkins, valuing the "gratuitous grace" of a bird in flight or a snow-covered tree.

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To correct would be a bit artificial, therefore almost dishonest.

Despite the concrete nature of many of his observations, Jaccottet's diaries and notebooks are described as difficult to grasp, perhaps due to temporal leaps that make his pages feel like a dream log. He persistently questioned how to approach things, akin to the urgent query of when to dismount a runaway horse. His work is sustained by a credible tone, a virtue he admired in others, and he frequently employed the adverb "inexplicably," allowing his poetry to offer an escape from the univocal and the grandiose.

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One cannot avoid the impression that Joubert has managed to capture, in the best moments, even the intonation by which a kind of truth is made immediately palpable.