I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
I am attached to the French language. I will defend the ubiquitous use of French.
You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.
Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.
I do consider myself as being French, I suppose.
I unfortunately don't speak French, but my wife is now fluent in English, which really reflects rather badly on me.