Louis Aragon, the famous French poet and novelist saw potential very early in Jacques Roubaud’s young career. Encouraged by this one, at the age of 12 in 1944 Jacques Roubaud published his first collection of poetry appropriately named Poésies juvéniles (Youthful Poem). And then a second anthology came in 1952 entitled Voyage du soir (Evening journey).
Since then Jacques Roubaud vocation has in many ways fulfilled its early promises. He has been the recipient of several prestigious literary prizes such as the Grand prix national de la poésie (Leading national prize for poetry) in 1990 and in 2008 the French Academy ‘Grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand (Leading literature Paul-Morrand Prize).
Jacques Roubaud is interested in the use of mathematics and computer science for oulipian writing. Fascinated by fixed forms of poetry such as sonnets, rangas and sestinas, in 1961 he writes a whole book on the writing of sonnets. Here as elsewhere Jacques Roubaud often experiments even though much of his work is also more traditional.
Jacques Roubaud did two doctorates, one in mathematics and one in French literature for which he wrote a dissertation called La Forme du sonnet français de Marot à Malherbe. Recherche de seconde rhétorique (The form of the French sonnet from Marot to Malherbe. Research in second rhetoric). He first became professor at the university in Paris and later in Rennes. Mathematics was to have a big influence on his literary work. He is the inventor of numerous poetic binds such as the “baobab” and the “generalised oulipian haiku.” In 1981 he co-founded with Paul Braffort a literature workshop assisted by mathematics and computers (ALAMA).
Jacques Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo, indeed calling out such suppression, thus indicating the presence of such constraints. He takes the Oulipian self-consciousness of writing to the extreme. This