Jacques Roubaud


Jacques Roubaud was a French poet, writer, and mathematician.

Life and career

Jacques Roubaud taught mathematics at University of Paris X Nanterre and poetry at EHESS. A member of the Oulipo group, he has published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French, such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.
Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo, yet takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of the writing act to an extreme. This simultaneity both appears playfully, in his Hortense novels, and with gravity and reflection in The Great Fire of London, considered the pinnacle of his prose. The Great Fire of London, The Loop, and Mathematics are the first three volumes of a long, experimental, autobiographical work known as "the project", and the only volumes of "the project", at present, to have been translated into English. Seven volumes of "the project" have been completed and published in French. To compose The Loop, Roubaud began with a childhood memory of a snowy night in Carcassonne and then wrote nightly, without returning to correct his writing from previous nights. Roubaud's goals in writing The Loop were to discover "My own memory, how does it work?" and to "destroy" his memories through writing them down.
Roubaud participated in readings and lectures at the European Graduate School, the Salon du Livre de Paris, and the "Dire Poesia" series at Palazzo Leoni Montanari in Venice.
In 1980, he married Alix Cléo Roubaud; she died three years later. Jacques Roubaud died on 5 December 2024, his 92nd birthday.

Selected bibliography

  • La Belle Hortense. Our Beautiful Heroine, trans. David Kornacker.
  • Quelque chose noir. Some Thing Black, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Photographs by Alix Cléo Roubaud.
  • L'Enlèvement d'Hortense. Hortense Is Abducted, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi.
  • Échanges de la lumière. Exchanges on Light, trans. Eleni Sikélianòs.
  • Le Grand Incendie de Londres . The Great Fire of London, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi.
  • La Princesse Hoppy ou Le Conte du Labrador. The Princess Hoppy, or The Tale of Labrador, trans. Bernard Hœpffner.
  • L'Exil d'Hortense. Hortense in Exile, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi.
  • La Pluralité des mondes de Lewis. The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop.
  • La Boucle . The Loop, trans. Jeff Fort.
  • Poésie, etcetera : ménage. Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House, trans. Guy Bennett.
  • Mathématique . Mathematics, trans. Ian Monk.
  • La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur des humains. The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart: 150 Poems, 1991–1998, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop.
  • Poésie .
  • La Bibliothèque de Warburg
  • Impératif catégorique
  • ''La Dissolution''

Awards and honors