With ‘A point of portraits’, Yves Pagès materializes the little human comedy

Mexico City. The change of scale towards the micro is the literary objective of the French writer Yves Pagès, who opts for density by saying everything in a minimum of words: nuances, paradoxes and possible contradictions, which he called the little human comedy.

The author presented his book in Mexico About portraits (Canta Mares) and talked about microfiction in France.

Pagès (Paris, 1963) explained to The Conference may your writing be short It has to do with poetry, the art of concentration, and with the kind of sketch in painting, which means expressing a lot with the fewest possible means. It is based on great richness in the lexicon and poverty in extension and resources. It is the contrast between using the minimum and at the same time having a lot of weight in the use of vocabulary..

The narrator maintained that he is inclined towards the way in which social contradictions cross the individual and is interested in detecting them in the existential logic of his characters: I try to see those internal confrontations that are expressed in the most intimate situations, with the displacement of the big questions towards the sphere of the intimate, which I call the little human comedy..

On a second level, Pagès mentioned “the series effect in which a small collective of characters is created that make up a we, which is expressed from the beginning with the dedication to ‘the first person of the plural’, which shows this articulation of the people and the community.”

The editor Melina Balcázar, who translated the text, highlighted that the narrator is one of the most unique and original voices in French. I liked that it is not the commercial imperative, of fashion, that leads him to write, but rather that he wants to understand and does so through form. These are factors that we like at Canta Mares: authors moved by a drive for form, understanding and poetics..

Yves Pagès emphasized the translator’s courage in making a version of her texts, characterized by playing with words and a playful way of approaching language. “If something is difficult to translate, it is humor. In my structure it goes from irony to black humor.

ironic distance

It is an ironic distance that is never sarcasm. It is always an emotion contained by irony. The difficult thing is finding this right distance from the humor that also expresses my love for the characters; In the case of essays, it is critical sincerity.

The text includes a section called Miss Francia seen from behind, that addresses the world’s problems, but in the form of essays focused on the small symptoms of a general malfunction. I proceeded to deal with representative microproblems. Does it matter or am I talking about everything that is on a small scale?.

He recalled that these writings were published in the Italian communist newspaper The poster, when he was a scholarship recipient at the Villa Medici, in Rome. “It was a challenge that forced him to shift from the short text to the essay.

“Perhaps in these texts of Miss France is the beginning of what I practice now. My two most recent books in France are like essays, done in a fragmentary way. For example, one is about the invasion of statistics, in the way of questioning the progressive myth, and the other is a story of the conveyor belts as an allegory of the history of capitalism.”

He commented that the tradition in which they are part Miss France and other recent texts of his to understand the evolution of certain aspects of society can be seen in The mythologiesby Roland Barthes, and in the work of Walter Benjamin, that leads to approaching thought, theory, with the techniques of literary, poetic and fiction.

In short, Pagès continued, I hope that these portraits and texts express microphenomena or microsymptoms; They are a sample of problems that, although they are of individuals, at the same time, because they are like archetypes, due to their brevity, they contain something more universal. The hope of every writer is that his singular imagination contains the global.

Regarding minifiction in his country, the editor also denied that there are great figures there nor a tradition of that literary form. “I saw in Cortázar’s literature, which I really like, the potential of these forms; or also in Max Aub, who ended his life in Mexico as a great figure of the Spanish exile. His best-known book in France is Exemplary crimeswhich is also among the 15 that I like the most.

“My previous collection of short texts, Small still lifes at work, perhaps it is the book with which I have had the most success in France. What stood out was the originality of dedicating oneself to this type of forms.”

He believed that the confrontation between the long and the short in France centered on the opposition between the novel and poetry since the 19th century. “Yes, it existed, if we think about Maupassant, but it did not prosper. The brief form was also expressed in the formalist games of the Oulipo group, in Georges Perec with his I remember. But for them the short forms would be like a place for experimenting with other things, but not narrative.”