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Le sud
Dans une Provence que le Pere confond avec l'Amerique au point d'appeler sa fille Virginie, dans une epoque qui est la notre mais qu'il refuse, au point d'elever ses enfants dans le culte des Indiens d'il y a plus d'un siecle, un etrange drame se joue: le Pere campagnard, fidele a son bogey attele de la jument Indiana, en proie a l'obsession d'arreter le temps, de figer le temps dans une eternite exotique, hostile non seulement aux voitures, au progres, mais a la vie dans son dynamisme meme; le Fils enfin, cadet de Virginie, dechire entre une fidelite impossible au Pere et une attirance impudique vers sa soeur, ne se resolvant a vivre ni dans un attachement morbide au psse ni dans un lien incestueux avec le present. Qu'arrivera-t-il ? Le Pere terrien reussira-t-il a retenir son fils dans les mirages du Paradis terrestre ? Virginie reussira-t-elle a faire de son frere un adulte ? Yves Berger evoque ici, dans un langage d'une poesie entierement nouvelle, le passage dechirant de l'enfance a l'age d'homme. Mais le theme, deja si riche de resonances, se developpe sur d'autres plans: l'opposition de la campagne et de la ville, de la terre-mere et de la femme-soeur, du monde clos et du monde ouvert, de la stagnation et du mouvement. Ou est la vraie vie Dans une participation active, mais impure et tourmentee, a l'existence ? Ou dans la contemplation du temps perdu ? Yves Berger se garde de repondre: c'est au lecteur d'interroger longuement le secret de ces trois etres, qui s'aiment, se fuient et se retrouvent au terme de leur aventure interieure. Publie en 1962, prix Femina, Le Sud a eu un retentissement considerable. Ce livre plein de l'amour de la vieille Amerique, Yves Berger l'ecrivit alors qu'il n'avait pas encore fait son premier voyage aux Etats-Unis, qui devait plus tard lui inspirer le celebre Fou d'Amerique."
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First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Yves Berger
31 books3 followersYves Berger est un écrivain et éditeur français né le 14 janvier 1931 à Avignon et décédé le 16 novembre 2004 à Paris.
Il est de 1960 à 2000 le directeur littéraire des Éditions Grasset, chez qui il publia plusieurs romans, dans lesquels il exprime son attachement aux États-Unis.
Fils de transporteur routier, il affirme que ce détail a son importance car plusieurs de ses ouvrages sont emplis de son amour des voyages. Après des études secondaires au lycée Frédéric Mistral d’Avignon, Yves Berger fait ses études supérieures à Montpellier et à Paris.
Il garde de ses origines méridionales la faconde, une grande jovialité et un accent proche de Raimu. Son enfance, bercée de Jack London ou de Fenimore Cooper, lui inspire cette passion du Nouveau Monde qui jamais ne le quitte.
Enseignant d’anglais, il entre en 1960 chez Grasset, dont il devient l’un des piliers. Il y gagne le surnom de « manitou des prix littéraires » et la réputation de faire ou défaire les prix. Il écrit son premier roman, Le Sud, en 1962 sur la Virginie avant la guerre de Sécession.
Yves Berger contribue aussi à faire connaître en France les auteurs francophones, tels Marie-Claire Blais ou Antonine Maillet et préface les œuvres d’auteurs indiens comme Dee Brown, Vine Deloria et de Scott Momaday à son sens le plus grand écrivain amérindien d’aujourd’hui.
Il est nommé en 1996 président de l’observatoire national de la langue française, organisme aujourd’hui défunt, puis le 17 octobre 2003 vice-président du Conseil supérieur de la langue française.
Il pestait contre les ravages de l’anglo-américain sur la langue française. En avril 2004, il est élu par l’Académie royale de langue et de littérature française de Belgique pour occuper le siège de Robert Mallet, décédé le 4 décembre 2002.
Il est de 1960 à 2000 le directeur littéraire des Éditions Grasset, chez qui il publia plusieurs romans, dans lesquels il exprime son attachement aux États-Unis.
Fils de transporteur routier, il affirme que ce détail a son importance car plusieurs de ses ouvrages sont emplis de son amour des voyages. Après des études secondaires au lycée Frédéric Mistral d’Avignon, Yves Berger fait ses études supérieures à Montpellier et à Paris.
Il garde de ses origines méridionales la faconde, une grande jovialité et un accent proche de Raimu. Son enfance, bercée de Jack London ou de Fenimore Cooper, lui inspire cette passion du Nouveau Monde qui jamais ne le quitte.
Enseignant d’anglais, il entre en 1960 chez Grasset, dont il devient l’un des piliers. Il y gagne le surnom de « manitou des prix littéraires » et la réputation de faire ou défaire les prix. Il écrit son premier roman, Le Sud, en 1962 sur la Virginie avant la guerre de Sécession.
Yves Berger contribue aussi à faire connaître en France les auteurs francophones, tels Marie-Claire Blais ou Antonine Maillet et préface les œuvres d’auteurs indiens comme Dee Brown, Vine Deloria et de Scott Momaday à son sens le plus grand écrivain amérindien d’aujourd’hui.
Il est nommé en 1996 président de l’observatoire national de la langue française, organisme aujourd’hui défunt, puis le 17 octobre 2003 vice-président du Conseil supérieur de la langue française.
Il pestait contre les ravages de l’anglo-américain sur la langue française. En avril 2004, il est élu par l’Académie royale de langue et de littérature française de Belgique pour occuper le siège de Robert Mallet, décédé le 4 décembre 2002.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 25, 2013
So. A sentence:
"But I remember my father's sentences when he started speaking, at first like a steady surge on which I rocked to and fro, then the sentence expanded, each new word filling it out and pushing it farther on, higher up and when it had reached that altitude at which I expected my father to gasp for breath, it arched its back in a fury and collapsed, huge, dislocated, digging a hole in its fall, and I hurriedly tried to bury, so as to find them later on, some of the words which had splashed me, but then the sentence started again, rose again, soon becoming a whirlwind, a cyclone and in fact my father did not run short of breath, his sentences were like those fishermen's nets I have read about which stretch for miles, hanging vertically, held by posts as my father's sentences were by commas, invisible posts, inaudible commas, present supports, hidden supports and that, I believe in the secret of a narrator's art, a novelist's art and not long ago, urged on by my sister, I myself tried to tell this story: Virginia before it changed, about 1842, and we know very little about that perfection, an equilibrium between flora, fauna and ourselves, then we had adequate weapons and men's dreams were flagging but the emigrants took to the sea, crazy hordes of covetous men who wanted nothing but to clear, plant, invent, and push back the natural frontiers and the tents became villages, the villages towns, the towns cities and I can see my father, every morning and again before the other two meals, reading the shit from the original text he translated word for word, from six to ten pages of the American Notes on which he often commented sentence by sentence so that the reading was always cut up, chopped into pieces longer than the passage itself and after Dickens one day it was Tocqueville the next, Le Pére du Poisson or Saint-Jean de Crévecoeur, not to mention that Frances Trolloppe whom my father hated as much as Dickens for her Domestic Manners of the Americans and whom, over the years, he had as it were married to the Englishman, calling her a shit too, I suppose because he could never think of a feminine form of the word."
Yes, "Virgina about 1842", a phrase which is repeated, like an incantation, until it becomes a single particle rather than a phrase. But we are not in Virginia, we are on an estate on the outskirts of Avignon, in the years of the occupation and after; an estate whose master has declared war on time, declaring it to have stopped in Virginia about 1842, and raised his son, our narrator, accordingly.
This book about the poison of nostalgia for the romanticized past -- in particular the European longing for the American wilderness and more particularly an insane vision of the Antebellum South but by (unstated) extension the fascist hatred of the modern that worked its magic on the father's generation -- how has it so dropped into invisibility (shall we romanticize a past in which it was salable)? 2014 will mark the 50th anniversary of its last American printing; google turns up only the expected bookseller listings and a handful of reviews from the first printing. A middling notice in the Saturday Review (which makes the high-schooler's error of confusing the author with the narrator, accusing him of the failings he is describing) suggests that the translation is mediocre; perhaps we are for a good one.
"But I remember my father's sentences when he started speaking, at first like a steady surge on which I rocked to and fro, then the sentence expanded, each new word filling it out and pushing it farther on, higher up and when it had reached that altitude at which I expected my father to gasp for breath, it arched its back in a fury and collapsed, huge, dislocated, digging a hole in its fall, and I hurriedly tried to bury, so as to find them later on, some of the words which had splashed me, but then the sentence started again, rose again, soon becoming a whirlwind, a cyclone and in fact my father did not run short of breath, his sentences were like those fishermen's nets I have read about which stretch for miles, hanging vertically, held by posts as my father's sentences were by commas, invisible posts, inaudible commas, present supports, hidden supports and that, I believe in the secret of a narrator's art, a novelist's art and not long ago, urged on by my sister, I myself tried to tell this story: Virginia before it changed, about 1842, and we know very little about that perfection, an equilibrium between flora, fauna and ourselves, then we had adequate weapons and men's dreams were flagging but the emigrants took to the sea, crazy hordes of covetous men who wanted nothing but to clear, plant, invent, and push back the natural frontiers and the tents became villages, the villages towns, the towns cities and I can see my father, every morning and again before the other two meals, reading the shit from the original text he translated word for word, from six to ten pages of the American Notes on which he often commented sentence by sentence so that the reading was always cut up, chopped into pieces longer than the passage itself and after Dickens one day it was Tocqueville the next, Le Pére du Poisson or Saint-Jean de Crévecoeur, not to mention that Frances Trolloppe whom my father hated as much as Dickens for her Domestic Manners of the Americans and whom, over the years, he had as it were married to the Englishman, calling her a shit too, I suppose because he could never think of a feminine form of the word."
Yes, "Virgina about 1842", a phrase which is repeated, like an incantation, until it becomes a single particle rather than a phrase. But we are not in Virginia, we are on an estate on the outskirts of Avignon, in the years of the occupation and after; an estate whose master has declared war on time, declaring it to have stopped in Virginia about 1842, and raised his son, our narrator, accordingly.
This book about the poison of nostalgia for the romanticized past -- in particular the European longing for the American wilderness and more particularly an insane vision of the Antebellum South but by (unstated) extension the fascist hatred of the modern that worked its magic on the father's generation -- how has it so dropped into invisibility (shall we romanticize a past in which it was salable)? 2014 will mark the 50th anniversary of its last American printing; google turns up only the expected bookseller listings and a handful of reviews from the first printing. A middling notice in the Saturday Review (which makes the high-schooler's error of confusing the author with the narrator, accusing him of the failings he is describing) suggests that the translation is mediocre; perhaps we are for a good one.
Displaying 1 of 1 review