Jacques Roubaud, a poet and mathematician whose formalist rigor and mind-bending imagery earned him France’s major poetry prizes, along with a place as one his country’s masters of contemporary verse, died in Paris on Dec. 5, his 92nd birthday.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the poet and scholar Jean-François Puff, who collaborated with Mr. Roubaud on one of his many books.
His death was also signaled by the celebrated literary group of which Mr. Roubaud was an early member, the Oulipo, which announced in the newspaper Le Monde that Mr. Roubaud was “henceforth excused from its meetings, by reason of death.”
Those words, combining a conventional formula with a startling predicate, suggest the tenor of Mr. Roubaud’s own subversive poetic work. Oulipo, an anagram for French words meaning “Workshop for Potential Literature,” was founded by the ex-Surrealist Raymond Queneau, author of the famous madcap novel “Zazie in the Metro.”
Mr. Queneau recruited Mr. Roubaud for the Oulipo in 1966, and Mr. Queneau’s project, melding formal constraint with imagination’s free rein, fit the poet’s own outlook — often whimsical, but tempered by a mathematicians’ discipline and interest in form. Mr. Roubaud was a mathematics professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre from 1970 to 1991.
Mr. Roubaud once wrote that “an Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.” The maze for Mr. Roubaud was often old verse forms like the sonnet, which he worked throughout his career to resurrect.
In 1967, a year after his induction into Oulipo, Mr. Roubaud, then 34, published his first major book of poetry, entitled “∈” — the Greek letter Epsilon, the symbol of belonging in mathematical set theory.
France’s literary world immediately sensed that a major talent was at hand. The poet and novelist Claude Roy announced in Le Monde, in a kind of telegram at the end of his review of “∈,” that “Poetry is not dead. STOP. Jacques Roubaud is born.”
In that review, headlined “The Revelation of a Poet,” Mr. Roy wrote, “In this book there is the superb coolness of a young Mephisto of the word.”
Mr. Roubaud’s major techniques were already present: the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated images, and themes of light and darkness, redemption and death.
He was an admirer of France’s great Cubist poet Pierre Reverdy, who specialized in using discordant word-pictures to suggest states of mind. He was also influenced by the medieval troubadours of Provence — himself a southerner, he became a recognized expert on the troubadours — and much of his poetry is infused with the bright sun of southern France. “The poetry of the troubadours,” he wrote, “is born penetrated by light and birds.”
The poem “Sun Noise,” from “∈,” begins as a paean to sunshine and contentment: “Sun noise sun heat/hands around our necks.” But it ends forebodingly: “and it couldn’t be better/if it weren’t for evening/and armed absence and death.”
In a long tribute in the magazine Le Nouvel Obs after his death, the critic Françoise Siri wrote that Mr. Roubaud was a “poetry virtuoso, an unchallenged expert in poetry’s most important forms.”
Mr. Roubaud’s life in poetry was punctuated by two losses: that of a younger brother who died by suicide in 1961, and that of his young wife, the photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud, whose death in 1983, three years after their marriage, inspired his best-known volume, “Quelque Chose Noir” (1986), translated by the American poet Rosmarie Waldrop as “Some Thing Black” and published in English in 1990.
“The mortal sea offers its chances/and I hasten in the wind/swimming towards insignificance,” Mr. Roubaud wrote in the poem “(Drowning),” and critics have noted what the translator John Taylor, writing in The Times Literary Supplement in 2000, called his “morbid propensities.”
But he was also a writer keenly aware of the demands of readers coming warily to abstract poetry like his. So he did his best to write poetry that played, amusingly, with the sound-world of the French language: “Petit tamis pour pépites petit” (“Small sieve for tiny seeds”), he wrote in the poem “Petit Tamis.”
“After all, people need rhyme,” Mr. Roubaud told an interviewer on the radio station France Inter in 2013. “This need for rhyme, this can be felt,” he said. “So I said I would answer this need.”
Explaining why he was in demand to give readings of his work, he said: “In France there are plenty of places that will take in a poet. It’s much cheaper than getting a singer or an opera or a theater group.”
The critics took note of that humility. “In the history of poetry Roubaud will be remembered as someone who gave back to the reader the sonorous resonance of the poem, the tessitura, the ancient rhythm of forms that are a thousand years old, which he examined minutely in all their constraints,” Ms. Siri wrote in Le Nouvel Obs.
His resurrection of the old forms was tied to his conviction that poetic language was uniquely capable of reconstituting the past — the personal past of both writer and reader.
“Poetry will call forth images, in a way that is both very difficult to control, intense, and also very difficult to transmit,” he told Mr. Puff for the book “Roubaud: Encounter With Jean-François Puff” (2008, not translated).
Mr. Roubaud believed that “only poetry can do this — make image-memories shoot up,” Mr. Puff said in a phone interview.
Jacques Denis Roubaud was born on Dec. 5, 1932, in Caluire-et-Cuire, on the outskirts of Lyon. His parents, Lucien and Suzanne (Molino) Roubaud, were both teachers and graduates of France’s most elite university, the École Normale Supérieure.
His mother was one of the first women graduates. His parents were in the French Resistance; his grandmother Blanche Molino is honored at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in part for having sheltered the historian Marc Bloch, later shot by the Nazis, during the war.
He later recalled that his devotion to form arose from his heritage: “As the son of teachers, I could never allow myself much indiscipline,” he told an interviewer.
Mr. Roubaud’s childhood was spent in the sun-filled southern city of Carcassonne. It was a period he remembered as “a lost paradise, the green paradise of childhood.” In contrast, Paris, where he moved when he was 12 — his father had been summoned by Gen. Charles de Gaulle to serve in the Liberation’s constituent assembly — was a “purgatory.”
“France was free,” he recalled, “but we, we lost most of our huge liberty.”
He published his first poetry when he was still a young teenager, but with the family insisting on a practical pursuit, he received advanced degrees in mathematics from the University of Paris in 1958 and later from the University of Rennes. Mathematics and poetry interacted with each other throughout his career, because, as Mr. Puff explained, “Troubadour poetry relies on the permutations of a finite number of elements,” rhythms and rhymes. “So you explore these permutations.”
His reputation grew after he was recruited into Oulipo, and he became a frequent contributor to France’s poetry reviews. In 1990 he won the national grand prize for poetry from the ministry of culture; in 2008 he won the Grand Prix de littérature Paul-Morand from the Académie Française; and in 2021 he won the Goncourt Prize for poetry.
He wrote nearly two dozen volumes of poetry, at least half of which have been translated into English, and many more books of prose, children’s stories, plays, novels, autobiography and translation.
Mr. Roubaud is survived by his fourth wife, Marie-Louise Chapelle, whom he married in 2003 and by a daughter, Laurence Roubaud, from his first marriage, to Sylvia Bénichou, the daughter of the great Harvard literary scholar Paul Bénichou. (That marriage and his third, to Marie Borel, ended in divorce.) He is also survived by a sister, Denise Roubaud, and a brother Pierre.
As he advanced into old age, Mr. Roubaud remained permeated by the deliberately off-kilter spirit inherited from the Surrealists whose descendant he was.
“I write by hand,” he said in 2013. “And I write with my feet, while walking. I fiddle with things. I make it up. No choice. But I don’t cheat.”
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