Jacques Roubaud
Jacques Roubaud (born 1932 in Caluire-et-Cuire, Rhône) is a French poet and mathematician.
He is a retired Mathematics professor from University of Paris X, a retired Poetry professor from EHESS and a member of the Oulipo group, he has also published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo (while mentioning their suppression, thereby indicating that such constraints are indeed present), yet takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of the writing act to an extreme. This simultaneity both appears playfully, with his Hortense novels, Our Beautiful Heroine, Hortense in Exile, and Hortense is Abducted, and with the gravity and reflection of the writing act as the affirmation of one's worth and existence in The Great Fire of London, considered the pinnacle of his prose.
“all that a world could be, no matter what,is, somewhere, in some way.fullness of possibles, consistency.no matter which talking head, minefor example, adjacent to my bodyandwhy notagainst my face, the angel's, the black shadow face itself,but all the seats are taken, all the worldsunavailableto you.”
“...what do all the objects in the world have in common if not the fact of being- and of being nothing but- the provisional permanence of certain changes.”
“It is true that living offers us the answers a long time before the questions.”
“Who will wake up at the end of my dream?”
“And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind”
“L'hypothèse d'une rencontre........l'hypothèse d'une réponse l'hypothèse de quelqu'un ”
“Je t'aime jusque là”