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Title |
Les Barreaux surannés, (« Outmoded Bars ») (poems)
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| Publisher(s) |
Jean Grassin, Paris |
| Publication |
1963 |
| Author |
E. Antébi |
| Preface |
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| Jacket |
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My first and last poems ever published.
At the time of this booklet’s publication, I was just 18. I had been invited to read one of my poems on the radio, by a woman with splendid red hair, a husky voice due to alcohol and cigarettes, sleepless nights and literary passions - a true legend of her time, Marianne Oswald.
Cabaret singer in Berlin during the Twenties, she was expelled by the Nazis (her real name was Alice Bloch). She was the interpreter of Kurt Weill songs, and Jean Cocteau had written for her Anna la Bonne. She had just played, at the time I met her, a role in a movie about the painter Modgliani. She came from another world, childlike, cruel and tender - the world of creation.
My teacher of History and Geography at Molière, where I prepared the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Anne le Guéré - she looked like a splendid lion and I liked her very much - wrote to me, thanking me for sending the book :
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30.12.1963
Charming Antébi,
It happens, time to time, that I ask myself if you will really have, in the future, the success I hope for your studies, but I never doubt your success in the seductive field of poetry : you have a real gift. I hope that these promises will become reality, and that, at least till the end of May, you will still remain, more modestly, the most original and decorative element of our little class.
Truly,
Anne Le Guéré.
And a poet, well-known at that time (he had written a serial for TV, Vidocq) , Georges Neveux, answered :
Miss (or Mrs),
My dear Poet,
You ask me about my first impressions on reading your poems. I would say that I felt partly emotion (as your emotion is quite infectious) and also a kind of charm (you have a musical sense of words).
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- Quelle élégance et quelle générosité chez l’auteur de Juliette des Esprits, le scénariste de Juliette ou la Clé des songes (de Carné) ou Arsène Lupin contre Arsène Lupin de Molinaro, celui qui a créé pour la télévision les Vidocq. Il avait alors environ 60 ans.
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FIRST WRITINGS, FIRST POEMS
| July 25, 1950 : 5 years old. To my father... |
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At 7, I was still dedicating my poems to my father (« Dad, I love you, And you love me, I adore you, when you dream. I love your kisses, I love your whispers, When I fall asleep, You - my mirror”) : |
Also, I wrote a very strange poem, where two words were confused – one representing a region, the other one, a wood
–something like a confusion between Mahogany and Milwaukee, lets say “Milwaugany”. I’ll try to translate: :
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Milwaugany Face
Dear Mother
Do you know Milwaugany Face
She was like her cheek
Like her mother
A magpie,
A mouse,
Oh, oh, how funny she was ;
Like the river Rhône.
But she was a sweetie,
Like her nanny-maidie
She loved her
From birth on.
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A fattie dirty,
Was there as a sister.
She touched Milwaugany wood
Therefore they called her Milwaugany Face.
She loved that, life,
Once, somebody discovered it.
She went into a landscape
And became suddenly still
But the somebody
Was clever
He saw her,
He took her
The maid-nanny
Is so sorry
She calls for help
In the courtyard
She says to the child
Who has now gone to a convent
'Sweetie
Come to your maidie”
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The child answered
Telling it twice :
“I cannot
Because it fits not.”
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