Babel Polyphonie

Jean-René Lassalle, born in 1961 in southwestern France, has lived in Germany for many years. As an author, Lassalle moves between languages as much as he does as a mediator and translator of German-language poetry (by Franz Josef Czernin, Peter Waterhouse, Thomas Kling, Barbara Köhler, Oswald Egger, among others). In his own poems he builds delicate little language machines that "sing in remix a mantra of resignation" to the late verses of Friedrich Hölderlin, he understands Chinese characters in all linguistic directions (horizontal and vertical as well as horizontal, backwards, spiral and palindr), and he "back-dreams" French, English and German in a circle to trills. These texts know "neither source nor target language, holograms de Babel, au vent tourne".