Writing in Another (French) Language

Abstract Rather than participating in the desecration of conventional French, ‘poetry’ is a spiritual experience, according to Michaux. Its capacity to transfigure its readers recalls the illumination of the ‘reader’ in ‘Portrait de A.’ and É cuador, and prefigures his account of Supervielle’s poetic transfiguration in his ‘lettremémo’ to Bertelé. Privileging a simultaneously physical and spiritual ‘frisson’ over the beauty of ideas, it speaks of and to emotions rather than the intellect, in that concrete language of ‘things’ which Michaux described in Les Rêves et la jambe as the pre-Babelic language of humankind.