Jean Daive, Antoni Tàpies

The meeting of the French-speaking Belgian Jean Daive and the Catalan Spaniard Antoni Tàpies is almost self-evident; both avant-garde artists are fascinated by numbers, signs and symbols. In Tàpies' oeuvre they occur frequently, and they are no exception in Daive's poems. It is not easy to find out who designed the title for this artist's book – a special sign. In artist's books, it is this interaction between author and artist and between text and image that is important. Tàpies' hand-painted version on the title page, for instance, is an 'explanation' of Daive's first lines 'I reversed the numbers of a diagonal / I reversed the wing' (‘j’inversais les nombres d’une diagonale / j’inversais l’aile’).

Silence: the poems of Jean Daive

Although Daive made radio programmes for a living, his poetry is mainly characterised by a fascination for silence. Maybe that is precisely what signs are: silent messages, without words. They are symbolised by a predominantly white type page. Daive's poems are hermetic. His aphoristic, elliptic style leaves much room for varied interpretations by readers. It is not without reason that his poems are compared to those of the Romanian-German poet Paul Celan. A French anthology of Celan's poems translated by Daive appeared under the title Strette et autres poèmes.

Celan translated Daive's debut (Décimale blanche) into German. From his correspondence it appears that at an early age Daive was very much impressed by Celan's poem Sprachgitter, about the impossibility to convey an essential message by language alone. The difference with Celan is that the verses are no longer fixedly registered, but, against convention, are put widely apart: one line at the top ('«un peu de') and at the bottom ('rat'), with much white in between. On the right hand page, at the bottom, the line is apparently finished ('un peu de père»’).