My epic canvas by Obelixed Wafflestork

Read this brief biography of Jacques Prévert (from Le Littéraire dans le quotidien: Resources for a transdisciplinary approach to reading/writing at the first and second year levels of college French ~Joanna Gay Luks • 2013 • CC BY)

Jacques Prévert (1900-77). French poet. Set to music by Kosma, interpreted by Yves Montand, learnt by heart in schools, dissected by academics, Prévert's poems have a uniquely important place in 20th-c. French culture. His is a poetry of the man in the street—essentially oral, often sentimental, disdainful of the high and mighty, respectful towards the underdog. Anarchic and playful, his spirit is pre-political, although the sketches he wrote during his participation in the agit-prop Groupe Octobre, some performed in factories in 1936, and his delightful script for Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, are quintessential expressions of the Popular Front ethos. A fringe member of the Surrealist group from 1925, he soon joined the dissidents along with his friends from the Groupe de la rue du Château (Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Queneau).

Prévert began writing poems in the early 1930s. However, long before the publication of his first collection (Paroles, 1946), he had made his name as a writer of film-scripts: Drôle de drame (1937), Quai des brumes (1938), Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), all directed by Marcel Carné and displaying a mixture of realism and poetry allied with a strong sense of character. The great success of Paroles after the war led Prévert to write more poetry […] mostly of a similar kind, dominated by clever punning, a sense of the marvellous, and an unerring feel for the quality of everyday life. [Michael Sheringham]

Source: French Literature Companion: www.answers.com/topic/jacques-pr-vert

The text that you will read is from Prévert’s famed first collection, Paroles. It involves a play on words and is written in the format of a playscript, a dialogue between two characters. It is a “word play”!

1. The poem is entitled “L’ accent grave.” Based on the information provided above about Prévert and his style of writing, what do you think the text will be about? What do you think it will be like to read it? Click on the pink + in the lower right-hand corner of this PadLet to post your response. Before you post, though, right-click on the 3-minute video below and watch it for fun; it was made for French news in 2000 upon the 100th anniversary of Prévert's birth. Try to identify five words in French related to Prévert in the vidéo and include them in your post!

(The next activity would be to read the poem, but it would be locked until students had completed this exercise. Here's a link to the poem for those who might want to read it: http://clicnet.swarthmore.edu/rire/textes/prevert.html)

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