French Literature Reviews - 2026

Wolfgang Matz, The Joy of Poetic Life
Poetry and Poetics

Translated from German by Rosine Inspektor

Translation, as we at Le Bruit du temps well know, is not only the best way to understand a text discovered in a foreign language; it is also, very often, an encounter—that of the translator with the author—as well as a matter of friendship. It so happens that Wolfgang Matz, along with his wife Elisabeth Edl, has published German translations of three French poets of the same generation, whose birth centenaries are being celebrated in the early 2020s. These three poets were themselves bound by ties of friendship, as well as by a certain conception of poetry, of which the journal L’Éphémère was one of the manifestations. Wolfgang Matz met them on several occasions and bore witness to their final years.

This book evokes these three figures by gathering several memories and revisiting certain texts he translated, while focusing primarily on what these encounters taught him: that poetry cannot be reduced to the production of books, but must also translate into a certain "rightness" in life itself. This is what gives these pages their value, even though one might naturally reproach them for an almost naive idealization of poetic existence. They should be read as a tribute to the quality of being of these three figures—a kind of friendly gesture of gratitude for what they were and what they represented, humanely, right to the very end (since this book is largely concerned with their final days) for those who shared their lives.

In a letter to Böhlendorf, Hölderlin spoke of the need he felt for the "Psyche unter Freunden"—a kinship of the soul that friends can share. This is precisely what this precious little book is about.

The volume emerges from a long-standing engagement with translation and literary friendship, positioning itself within the rich tradition of European poetic exchange and memoir. By focusing on three French poets whose centenaries fall in the early 2020s, the work reflects on a specific shared conception of verse famously associated with circles like the journal L’Éphémère. Rather than offering a formal critical study, the text gathers personal recollections and reflections on translated works, exploring how artistic creation intersects with the lived experiences and final days of these figures, and readers interested in literary memoir, European poetry, and the personal dimensions of translation may find this volume relevant.