Patrick Quillier

Patrick Quillier has spent a long time in Europe, Africa and the Indian Ocean, notably as a teacher of Classics in Portugal, Austria and Hungary. Since 1999 he has been teaching General and Comparative Literature at the University of Nice. Translator and editor of Fernando Pessoa in the Pléiade, he has translated contemporary Portuguese and Hungarian poets. The first line of his collection Office du murmure (1996, Éditions de la Différence) evokes "a whole temptation of darkness", not in order to claim a hermetic posture, but by reference to the "lessons of darkness" of Baroque music, in which the inevitable work of mourning becomes a work of life. The whisper is for him the model of the poem and of the music, trembling repetition of the fragile force of living, tireless ostinato of freedom and revolt. A tenuous voice that one hardly hears, except through fine listening. He hopes that this can be felt not only in his poems and musical compositions, but also in his articles, prefaces and academic essays.