Fou de Paris

by Eugène Savitzkaya

« Ici, à Paris, au bord du canal, à deux pas du grand palais indien aux fresques colorées, il pense à vous, le fou qui marche, le fou qui sue, le fou qui boit l’eau fraîche de la fontaine d’Aubervilliers, l’eau filtrée par les sables du sous-sol d’Aubervilliers, l’eau vivante, l’eau habitée, froide et fluctuante. Il pense à vous, le fou, à vous qui chantez l’après-midi lumineux dans vos appartements étroits en regardant une fleur du papier peint qui recouvre les vieux murs humides ou bien une fleur épanouie dans un petit vase de zinc vieilli, de verre dépoli ou de porcelaine fine, ou en épluchant un oignon rouge, cet oignon qui fait pleurer vos yeux, vos yeux de chatte ou de renarde, vos jeunes yeux ou vos vieux yeux de chien battu, en allumant des bougies, les sept bougies du chandelier ou les deux bougies flanquant le portrait fané de votre grand-mère qui vous fait un signe depuis le paysage enneigé d’un lointain passé. Et ce fou vous écrit qu’il faut peut-être changer de terre, de globe, de famille ou de pays. Il vous aime tant tous les trois, tous les dix-sept, tous les milliards, comme féerie indispensable au bon cours des choses, comme fantôme bienveillant. »

140 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 5, 2023

About the author

As a son of East European immigrants, Eugène Savitzkaya spent his childhood in the Walloon countryside. His imagination thrived on the fairy stories told to him by his Russian mother. He discovered the Surrealists at a very early age, after which he published a couple of volumes of poetry, which were obsessive and of an exceptional intensity. He did this under the auspices of that other poet of Liège, Jacques Izoard (1936–2008), who was his mentor for a long time. After Mentir (1977), his work was predominantly published by the trendsetting Parisian publishers, Minuit. His work has been greeted with praise by critics and admiration by a faithful French and Belgian readership, but he has continued to live in the hinterland of Liège as a loner, averse to all schools and coteries.

From the 1990s onwards, oppressiveness and darkness in Savitzkaya’s work made way for more lightness and ‘folly’, as one can see in La Folie originelle (1991), Fou civil (1999) and Fou trop poli (2005). He wrote essays about painters (for instance Hieronymus Bosch), and poetic hymns to his children when young: Marin mon coeur (1992), for which he won the Prix Triennal du Roman of the French-speaking Community of Belgium in 1994, and Exquise Louise (2003). In recent years, his poetry performances have attracted notice (Nouba, 2007; Contre l’homme 2010). These are a sort of reconciliation rite, sometimes taking the form of a lengthy toast to the bond between man and wife – “tied on their belly with a handsome sailor’s knot”.

Most of the texts by Eugène Savitzkaya are labelled as ‘novels’, but all of his work – prose, poetry, plays and essays – testify to the poetic glow in which he sees and describes everyday life. The celebration of ‘everyday miracles’, once a leitmotif of the Surrealists, acquires an unobtrusive but extremely personal interpretation in Savitzkaya’s work. His often fragmentary, repetitive “word machines” have nothing psychologising or cerebral about them. Savitzkaya is a poet of the open air, of the painstaking, even delirious observation. His “grating, sputtering, jingling” language aims to “do justice to the air, the wind, and the situation there and now”. With a sometimes sombre, sometimes intimate, but always sensual voice, he sings of metamorphosis, of unity and dissolution. The world appears to him as a garden in which everything and everyone – plants, insects and people – are doomed to change, to melt away and disappear. “You are beautiful as/ something that withers and/ falls to the ground, he once/ dared to say,” writes Savitzkaya in Nouba.