Profound gratitude and the rule of recognition (Roubaud greened by a greened Reverdy)

The reading of Jacques Roubaud’s latest book, Strophes reverdie (2019), based on the poems of Pierre Reverdy’s Plupart du temps, calls for reflection on rewriting as an ambivalent act of recognition that also implies appropriation, or even paradoxically reduction. Nevertheless, by taking on a creative and transformative dimension, this active recognition of a past to be fruitful is above all directed towards the present and the future, deserving to be qualified as “lively recognition”.