France to honour Irish poet with Chevalier award

THE IRISH poet John Montague is to be made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, one of France’s highest decorations.

Montague, who turned 80 last year, said he was “very pleased” to learn that his name was included on the French government’s annual Bastille Day honours list.

Speaking from Nice, where he and his wife Elizabeth live for part of the year, Montague said he first heard the news when contacted yesterday by the Irish ambassador to Paris, Paul Kavanagh.

“It’s rather a special occasion, because I didn’t know it was coming,” he said.

“I was very pleased. People have the other country – a dream of another country, as a corrective to the one that you grew up in. In my generation at UCD, it was Spain. I think Spain was extremely cheap at that time, and the red wine flowed. I don’t have the Spanish thing, but I do have the French thing.”

Montague’s connections to France stretch back to 1948, when he and a friend travelled to the battlefields of northern France by bicycle. “I loved French poetry,” he recalled yesterday.

“The French poets seemed to be so dangerous, spending their time with absinthe and having riotous private lives.

“I was convinced I was going to be a Co Tyrone Rimbaud. I’ve calmed down since.”

Montague said Joyce and Beckett were “at least partly to blame” for his interest in France.

He lived in Paris during the political ferment of the late 1950s and 1960s, when he became a “neighbour and drinking friend” of Beckett and got to know many French poets.

During his time in the city, he also worked as Paris correspondent for The Irish Times, attending fin de règneCharles de Gaulle press conferences and "writing when I had something to write about".

In addition to his own acclaimed volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir, Montague has translated contemporary French poets such as Francis Ponge into English.

One of his current works-in-progress is a collection of his French translations, which will be published by Gallery Press. The publication date has not yet been set, he remarked yesterday, but “this is going to put fire under my tail”.

Among those who were honoured in this year’s Bastille Day list were actors Isabelle Adjani and Charlotte Rampling, the head of TF1 television Martin Bouygues, the philosopher Michel Serres, the historian Pierre Rosanvallon and the Serbian film director Emir Kusturica.