Maurice Blanc, Francis Ponge - La Seine - 1950

VERY BEAUTIFUL FRENCH PHOTOBOOK ABOUT THE RIVER "Seine" -
with 111 great photos by Maurice Blanc and the wonderful text by famous French author Francis Ponge (1899-1988).

LIMITED AND NUMBERED - here copy number 5036.

BREATH-TAKING PHOTOGRAVURE PRINTING.

“If Paris holds such a prominent place, it is because Paris is the Seine, just as much as the Seine is Paris.”
- Francis Ponge -

Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge (1899-1988) was a French writer and poet. He developed a form of prose poem, minutely examining everyday objects. He was the third recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.
Francis Ponge was associated with the Surrealist group, without fully adhering to the movement. Through his poems, he sought to redefine creative processes and the relationship between the signifying language and the thing signified, in opposition to lyric poetry and its subjectivity. In favor of a descriptive quest, he explored the consideration of things within the very framework of a poetic, political, and ironic struggle against the inadequacy of the word. These projects were linked to his humanist and atheist views, as well as to active engagement against Nazism and fascism. Indeed, the poet joined the Communist movement, albeit not without reservations.
(more about Francis Ponge at the end of this description).

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Francis Ponge finally resorts to acts of measuring/mastering the river by combining science and poetry. He is the poet of the most banal objects. “From the moment one considers words as a material, it becomes very pleasant to deal with them—just as pleasant as it can be for a painter to work with colors and forms. Very enjoyable to play with them. (…) Moreover, it is only on the basis of the particular properties of verbal matter that certain things can be expressed—or rather, things themselves. (…) When it comes to rendering the relationship between human beings and the world, it is only in this way that one can hope to escape the boring merry-go-round of feelings, ideas, theories, etc.” Through this radical reversal of the role and function of the poet, Francis Ponge exerted a considerable influence on contemporary French poetry.
For Ponge, the poet’s mission does not consist in displaying his feelings, but in attaining as accurately as possible the materiality of an object, of a “thing.” He is the poet of the most banal objects. For him, things have an existence of their own and become poetic objects as soon as they are observed attentively.
In La Seine, Ponge encounters, on a double level, the difficulty of giving the river a satisfactory form. First, the existence of clichés obstructs perception and must therefore be eliminated. Then discomfort sets in: the river resists all representation and all domestication and refers back to a raw reality. Ponge finally resorts to acts of measuring/mastering the river by combining science and poetry.

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La Guilde du livre, Lausanne. 1950. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover. 195 pages (75 pages with text, 112 pages with 111 photos and 8 additonal pages including the list of the photos). Photos: Maurice Blanc. Text: Francis Ponge. Text in French.

Condition:
Inside fresh and flawless, clean with no foxing and with no previous owner marks (excepted a very beautiful Ex-libris from 1945 on the rear side of the front cover). Outside with little trace of use; two small defects (at the spine and at the rear side), otherwise quite fresh. Overall fine condition.

Wonderful French photobook.

"Francis Ponge was born into a Protestant family in Montpellier, the son of Armand Ponge, a banker, and his wife Juliette, née Saurel. He studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and the École de droit where he read law, In 1918–1919 he served in the French army. In 1919 he joined the Socialist Party.
Ponge worked for the Parisian publishing companies Gallimard (1923–1931) and Hachette (1931–1937), and before the outbreak of the Second World War he was briefly an insurance salesman. His earliest poems were published in 1923, and he established a reputation in French literary circles, principally for his contributions to the Nouvelle Revue Française. The editor of the publication, Jean Paulhan, became Ponge's mentor, and remained so for many years. Their correspondence continued until Paulhan's death in 1968. During the 1930s Ponge was for a short while associated with the Surrealist movement, influenced by which he joined the Communist Party in 1937.
During the Second World War, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, 1942–1944 and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly L'Action 1944–1946. He left the Communist Party in 1947. From 1952 to 1965 he held a professorship at the Alliance française in Paris. In 1966 and 1967 he was a visiting professor at Barnard College and Columbia University in the US.
In his later years Ponge was a recluse, living at his country house. He died in Le Bar-sur-Loup at the age of 89.
Awards made to Ponge included the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1974), Académie française's French National Poetry Prize (1981), and the Grand prix of the Société des gens de lettres (1985).
He was a Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur (1983).
In his work, Le Parti pris des choses (often translated The Voice of Things), he meticulously described common things such as oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in a poetic voice, but with a personal style and paragraph form (prose poem) much like an essay.
Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects. He described his own works as "a description-definition-literary artwork" which avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry. His principal aim was to avoid stereotypical thinking. In Le Grand Recueil (The Grand Collection), published in 1961 he explained his "concentration on simple objects – stones, grass, directed towards a restoration of the power and purity of language," according to his obituary in The Times.
In 1967 he published his best-known work, Le Savon, translated as Soap (1969), a long prose poem that, in the words of The Times "is unique precisely because, and often very humorously, it exhausts the topic of the word and the thing.
Other works include 'La Guêpe', a word play on the name of painter Émile Picq (1911–1951)."
(Wikipedia)