Pierre Gamarra

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Pierre Gamarra
Gamarra in Toulouse, 1945
Gamarra in Toulouse, 1945
BornPierre Albert Gamarra
(1919-07-10)10 July 1919
Toulouse, France
Died20 May 2009(2009-05-20) (aged 89)
Argenteuil, France
OccupationWriter
GenreNovel, Children's literature, Fable, Poetry, Essay
SubjectToulouse, Midi-Pyrénées
Notable works
  • La Maison de feu (1948)
  • Le Maître d'école (1955)
  • La Mandarine et le Mandarin (1970)
  • Mon cartable
Notable awards
  • Hélène Vacaresco
    Prize for Poetry 1943
  • National Council of the Resistance Prize 1944
  • Veillon International Grand Prize for the Novel 1948
  • Literature for the Youth Prize 1961
  • SGDL Grand Prize for the Novel 1985
Signature
Website
pierregamarra.com

Pierre Gamarra (French pronunciation:

chief editor and director of the literary magazine Europe.
Gamarra is best known for his poems and novels for the youth and for narrative and poetical works deeply rooted in his native region of Midi-Pyrénées
.

Life

Pierre Gamarra was born in

German Occupation, he joined various Resistance groups in Toulouse, involved in the writing and distributing of clandestine publications. This led him to a career as a journalist, and then, more specifically both as a writer and a literary journalist.[1]

In 1948, Pierre Gamarra received the first

Books Abroad as "a beautifully written tale of humble life, which Philippe and Jammes would have liked".[3]

From 1945 to 1951, he worked as a journalist in Toulouse. In 1951, Louis Aragon, Jean Cassou and André Chamson offered him a position in Paris as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Europe.[4] He occupied this position until 1974, when he became director of the magazine. Under Pierre Gamarra's direction, Europe continued the project initiated in 1923 by Romain Rolland and other writers.[n 3] Until 2009, Pierre Gamarra also contributed to most of the magazines's issues with a book review column titled "La Machine à écrire" (The Typewriter).[n 4][5]

Most of his novels take place in his native South-West of France: he wrote a

FR3 in 1973. The film, casting Claude Brosset [fr], was shot in the town of Najac.[10]

In 1955, he published one of his best known novels, Le Maître d’école;[n 6] the book and its sequel La Femme de Simon[n 7] (1962) received critical praise.[11]
Reviewing his 1957 short stories collection Les Amours du potier,[n 8] Lois Marie Sutton deems that, although war affects the plots of many of "all (those) delightful thirteen stories", "it is the light-hearted plot that Gamarra maneuvers best" and that "as in his previous publications, (the author) shows himself to be a master delineator of the life of the average peasant and employee."[12]

In 1961, Pierre Gamarra received the Prix Jeunesse [fr] for L'Aventure du Serpent à Plumes[n 9] and in 1985, the SGDL Grand Prize[n 10] for his novel Le Fleuve Palimpseste.[n 11]

Pierre Gamarra died in Argenteuil on 20 May 2009, leaving a substantial body of work, not yet translated into English for the most part. The Encyclopædia Britannica sees in him a "delightful practitioner with notable drollery and high technical skills"[13] in the art of children's poetry and children's stories. His poems[n 12] and fables[n 13][17] are well known by French schoolchildren.[18][19][20]

Selection of works

In French unless otherwise stated

Literature for the youth

Stories

Fables collections

Poetry

CD

Adaptations

Novels
Reedited De Borée (2014)
ISBN 9782812911491
Editions of the book since 1948
Book cover of Pierre Gamarra's poetry collection Essais pour une malédiction (1943), Hélène Vascaresco Prize for Poetry

Short stories

  • Les Amours du potier, Éditions La Baconnière [fr] (Neuchatel), 1957
  • Un cadavre; Mange ta soupe, Prix National de la Résistance 1944

Poetry collections

About Pierre Gamarra

In French unless otherwise stated

Book reviews in English

Literary journals special issues

  • Poésie Première "Tarn en Poésie 2003: Avec Pierre Gamarra"
  • Poésie Première No. 29 (2004)

Interviews

Homages

Two streets (one in

cul-de-sac in Boulazac—, two schools (one in Montauban, the other in Bessens[22])— and two public libraries (one in Argenteuil,[23] the other in Andrest
) are named after Pierre Gamarra.

Notes

  1. ^ La Maison de feu means ″The fiery house″. The novel takes place in Toulouse during the 1930s.
  2. ^ Gathered in La Tour-de-Peilz, the jury also included Léon Bopp [fr], Maurice Zermatten, Charles Guyot, Louis Martin-Chauffier and Robert Vivier.[2]
  3. ^ For instance, many issues were devoted to an extensive presentation of countries whose literature is not internationally very well known.
  4. ^ In French La Machine à écrire; since 2009, the column is continued in Europe by Jacques Lèbre.
  5. ^ In French Les Coqs de Minuit.
  6. ^ French for The Schoolmaster.
  7. ^ French for Simon’s wife, Simon being Simon Sermet, the main character in both novels.
  8. ^ French for A Potter's lovers.
  9. ^ L’Aventure du Serpent à Plumes, French for ″The Adventure of the Feathered Snake″, is a novel for the youth.
  10. ^ In French, Grand Prix de la Société des gens de lettres pour le roman.
  11. ^ Le Fleuve palimpseste, French for ″The Palimpsest river″. The river is the Garonne.
  12. ^ Pierre Gamarra’s best known poems include Mon cartable (My schoolbag),[14] My School[15] and The Clock.
  13. ^ His best known fables include The Cosmonaut and his host, The Apple, The Ski, The mocked Mocker (Le Moqueur moqué) or The Fly and the Cream.[16]
  14. ^ French for The Woman and the River. The river is, again, the Garonne.[21]
  15. Goncourt Prize’) is set in Moissac
    .

See also

References

  1. ^ ″This is how a countryside schoolteacher who had been studying at the 'École normale primaire', became, through the turmoil of the Phoney War and the Resistance, a poet, a novelist, a journalist living in the region of Paris, member of the editorial board at the magazine Europe for some fifty years.″
    (...) c’est ainsi que l’instituteur rural préparé par ses années d’École normale primaire s’est mué, les bouleversements de la drôle de guerre et la Résistance aidant, en un poète, romancier, journaliste vivant en région parisienne, membre pendant quelque cinquante ans du comité de rédaction de la revue Europe (...)
    Claude Sicard, ″Pierre Gamarra″ in Balade en Midi-Pyrénées, sur les pas des écrivains, Alexandrines, 2011 (Excerpt on the Publisher website (in French)).
  2. ^ Simone Hauert Annabelle, Year 8, number 85, March 1948 (Lausanne), p. 45. See also Le Confédéré (Martigny) number 59, 19 May 1948 p. 2. (Read online).
  3. JSTOR 40086832
    .
  4. ^ Encyclopédia Universalis: Pierre Gamarra(in French).
  5. ^ See the Journal tables:
  6. ^ ″Pierre Gamarra kept for all his life his passion for the regions along the Garonne river: it was present in his poems, novels and stories.″ (Pierre Gamarra conservera toute sa vie une passion pour ces terres de Garonne qui reviendront dans ses poèmes, ses romans, ses récits.)
    Alain Nicolas, ″Pierre Gamarra est mort″, L’Humanité, 25 May 2009. (online version(in French))
  7. ISSN 0196-3570
    .
  8. JSTOR 40143008
    .
  9. ISBN 9782844949097
  10. ^ "TV adaptation (Les Coqs de Minuit) on the Internet Movie Data Base". Retrieved 9 August 2011.[permanent dead link]
  11. ISSN 0006-7431
  12. JSTOR 40098002
    .
  13. Fontainesque
    fables of notable drollery and high technical skill.
  14. ^ Mon cartable is for instance chosen in France Inter poetry yearly selection for 2012, read by Guillaume Gallienne: listen online(in French); or on Édouard Baer's Radio Nova program, "Un enfant, un poème" in December 2017: listening online.
  15. ^ "Mon école", online reading on Radio Nova (2017).
  16. ^ La Mouche et la Crème, online on Radio Nova.
  17. ^ Most of Pierre Gamarra’s fables are collected in La Mandarine et le Mandarin (1970) and in Salut, Monsieur de La Fontaine (2005), (rewiewed on Le Printemps des poètes’ website (in French)).
  18. ^ ″His abundant body of work has earned him a prominent place in Children’s literature; his poems are read in schools, taught and learned by heart.″ (Sa frénésie d'écrire lui confère une place de choix dans la littérature enfantine ; on lit ses poèmes dans les écoles, on les enseigne, on les apprend.)
    Guillaume de Toulouse-Lautrec, foreword to Mon pays l'Occitanie, 2009, p. 12.
  19. ^ "The homework that inspires horror in families - BBC News". BBC News. 19 June 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2016.
  20. ^ "Projet pédagogique. Les élèves passent aux fables à Mesnils sur Iton" (in French). Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  21. ^ Armen Kalfayan, Review of La Femme et le Fleuve, Books Abroad Vol. 26, No. 3, Summer, 1952
  22. ^ "Chronologie". Les Amis de Pierre Gamarra (in French). 3 June 2018. Retrieved 17 June 2019.
  23. ^ Pierre Gamarra Library in Argenteuil page. (in French)

External resources

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