GENET, Jean (1910-1986)

GENET, Jean (1910-1986)

Fragment of an autograph poem
N.p.n.d [Paris, prison de la Santé – 1943], 1/4 p. in4°
Slightly frayed left margin

Precious first draft fragment of a poem composed in Prison and attached to “La Parade”, unpublished in its manuscript version

Canaille oserez-vous me mordre une autre fois ?
Retenez que je suis le page du Monarque.
Vous roulez sous ma main comme un flot sous ma barque.
Votre houle me gonfle, ô ma caille des bois.

ma caille emmitouflée et morte écrasée sous mes doigts.

Genet’s versified work translates into six long pieces collected in a 1948 collection soberly titled Poèmes.
By far the most composite of the poems published in the volume, and the last one that summons the prison universe, “La Parade” (whose title is also that of one of Rimbaud’s most enigmatic Illuminations) is composed of eight partially autonomous pieces, almost all of which were probably written in 1943.
This fragment is composed of a rhyming quatrain embraced and a monostic. We immediately note the presence of a punctuation, almost entirely absent (only two commas and an end period remain) in the collection published in 1948 and taken as it is in the edition of the Pleiade, as well as a variant: “et morte” becomes “écrasée”.
Finally, we note that the hyphenation at the hemstitch in the monostic does not show a comma, unlike the published version.