Jacques Roubaud

Who is Jacques Roubaud?

Jacques Roubaud is a French poet and mathematician.

Jacques Roubaud is a professor of poetry at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he was a professor of Mathematics at University of Paris X. He is a retired Poetry professor from EHESS and a member of the Oulipo group, he has also published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.

Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo, yet takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of the writing act to an extreme. This simultaneity both appears playfully, in his Hortense novels, Our Beautiful Heroine, Hortense in Exile, and Hortense is Abducted, and with gravity and reflection in The Great Fire of London, considered the pinnacle of his prose.