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French poet and writer (1921–2020) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frédéric Jacques Temple (18 August 1921 – 5 August 2020) was a French poet and writer. His work includes poems (collected in 1989 in a "Personal Anthology"), novels, travel stories and essays.
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (January 2021) |
He also realised translations of English, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell.
Frédéric Jacques Temple was born in Montpellier, where he was a boarder at the college of the Enclos Saint-François; there, he said, "music and art counted as much as studies". He celebrated this school, now disappeared, in L'Enclos.
From 1943 he participated in the Italian campaign (Les Abruzzes, Monte Cassino, le Garigliano) with the French Expeditionary Corps of general Juin. From this experience of war, which profoundly marked it, testifies a narrative like La Route de San Romano and his Poèmes de guerre.
Demobilized, he became a journalist in Morocco and then in Montpellier. In 1954, he was appointed Director of French Television Broadcasting (RTF, then ORTF and FR3) for Languedoc-Roussillon. He held office until 1986.
The meeting with Blaise Cendrars, in 1949, was decisive in his vocation as a writer. He paid homage to him in his poem "Merry-go-round". Like the author of the 'Transsiberian', Temple is a poet from around the world. The work of this man of the South, while deeply inscribed in his native region, has never ceased to open up to other horizons (the United States, Quebec, Brazil, Russia) and this taste for travel sometimes suggested an American poet.
This openness to the world is manifested in his friendships with Henry Miller, Henk Breuker, Curzio Malaparte, Joseph Delteil, Richard Aldington, Camilo José Cela, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Carrière, Gaston Miron ...
The friend of painters (Pierre Soulages, Jean Hugo, Albert Ayme , Vincent Bioulès...) he has often collaborated with them to create precious and sought-after books.
As a child, Temple was a "book-eater", fascinated by the novelists of the adventure (Jules Verne, James Fenimore Cooper, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and the "double heroes" such as Jack London, Arthur Rimbaud or Cendrars for whom "Writing is only one of the many forms of life". More concerned with elementary forces than with literary theories, taking the risk of being sometimes misunderstood, he kept himself apart from the doctrines which saw poetry as a pure exercise of the mind.
In his "infinite hunting," this enthusiastic collector never ceased to collect what natural history, archeology, music, painting, travel, love or gastronomy offered to his gluttony.
Frédéric Jacques Temple received in 2003 the Grand prix de poésie de la SGDL (Société des gens de lettres) and in 2013 the prix Apollinaire, seen as the prix Goncourt of poetry. He was a member of the comité d'honneur de la Maison internationale des poètes et des écrivains at Saint-Malo.[1]
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