Je suis comme je suis

There are those who have always considered Prevert no more than a surrealist clown, with (as one American poet has said): “a tinpanalley ear for a cadence, and the cheapest mind this side of Hollywood, with the least integrity, and the most eagerness to fake and crib and puff himself up.” And he is finally put down by today’s poets and critics for committing the cardinal crime of too much clarity in a world whose very Absurdity Absurdly cries for an expression of that Absurdity in all its arts.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Jacques Prevert, from the Translator’s Note to Paroles