Sonets - Sonnets - Bernat Manciet

Sonets - Sonnets - Bernat Manciet

In 1996, when Jorn published the Occitan sonnets of Bernard Manciet (1923-2005), they were already partially known: a slim collection in a deluxe edition that had been out of print for many years, and scattered pieces or series of pieces in magazines that were sometimes difficult to access. Manciet's readers were well aware, however, that there was here, in a different form and with different ambitions, a kind of equivalent to L'Enterrement à Sabres.

The bilingual Occitan and French versions of Bernard Manciet's collection, prepared for Jorn, at last gave us full access to a poetic universe astonishing for its overall coherence and extreme diversity of detail. The sonnets - more than one hundred and twenty gathered here - by their obligatory form and the infinite variations that this paradoxically favors, appear as the vibrant heart of a writing in progress.
A unique voice is born, trying out countless postures of the world and of words, building its own echoes and palinodies, and never ceasing to provoke the emergence of images and scenes that run relentlessly through it. A poetic sum that is above all a sum of embodied language, the dough and leaven of words raised up to embrace the immensity of the great world.

This reprint, identical to the 1996 edition, has been carefully revised by Guy Latry, a tireless companion of the Sabres writer's work and his attentive proofreader.

Reissued 2023 (first edition: 1996). With a French version by the author.
Editions Jorn.

The author:
Bernard Manciet (1923-2005) dedicated his entire career to his native village, Sabres, on the Grande Lande of Gascony, and to the region's "black" language, a peculiarly phonetic form of Gascon which, over the years, became a veritable style and, beyond that, an authentic myth, moving directly from the local to the cosmic. Highly cultured, a diplomat for a time after studying in Bordeaux and then Paris, Manciet was, more than anyone else, a man from somewhere and everywhere. The positions he held in Germany and then Brazil, as well as his entire life spent just a stone's throw from Sabres from the early 1950s onwards, his extensive knowledge of Latin, Greek, German and Iberian languages, made him a living synthesis of water and fire, a "monster of originality", as his friend the poet and medievalist René Nelli liked to say.
From his first poems published in the magazine Reclams in the late 1940s to his great poetic work, L'Enterrement à Sabres, a great poem at once epic and familiar in which all the little people of the Lande are brought together, Manciet never ceased, at his own pace, to develop in all directions a style of writing that one would recognize among a thousand others.