Curriculum Violette

Description

“Each CV follows the same pattern, over seven or eight well spaced pages; name, date of birth, address, date of document, weather, and then a series of increasingly eccentric or surreal categories, capturing Violette’s journeys (through lists of station names with fleeting impressions), the terrain in which she has found herself, an old story that touches on her situation, a shopping list, a prayer, an assessment of her performance, a food diary, a list of possessions carried with her.

In a sense, this is a simple technique; but it is hard to overstate the impact of a format that combines such a detailed, sensitive and loving poetic evocation of a life with such an inexorable documentation of the loss of that life, through Violette’s marriage in 1940 to Free French soldier Etienne Szabo, the birth of their daughter in 1942, his death in action in North Africa later that year, her recruitment to the Special Operations Executive and training in Scotland, her brief but heroic service in France in the summer of 1944, and her eventual capture, interrogation, imprisonment and death, executed with a single shot at Ravensbruck in February 1945.”

– Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, 13 February 2021

Curriculum Violette is poet and biographer Robert Crawford’s commemoration of Violette Szabo (1921–45), the remarkable French-born British agent who fought alongside members of the Resistance in wartime France and who died at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Published to mark the centenary of her birth, Curriculum Violette uses familiar forms — most obviously that of the CV — to present Violette Szabo’s multifaceted life in England, France, Scotland, and Germany. Pithily and arrestingly, it sums up a person whose insistent humanity shines through the timetabled, mechanical systems of military and civilian life, and even through the bureaucracy of death.

Curriculum Violette commémore la vie de Violette Szabo (1921–45): intrépide agente franco-britannique qui combattit aux côtés de la Résistance, durant la Second Guerre Mondiale, avant d’être déportée au camp de Ravensbrück où elle laissa sa vie. Ecrit pour marquer le
centenaire de la naissance de Szabo, cette oeuvre du poète et biographe écossais Robert Crawford utilise un format familier — celui du CV — saisissant la vie mouvementée de la combattante, entre l’Ecosse, l’Angleterre, la France et l’Allemagne. Un modèle de retenue et de limpidité, Curriculum Violette resitue le portrait de son héroïne, dont l’humanité pressante nous parvient malgré les formulaires
et les engrenages de la vie civile et militaire, jusqu’au sein même de la bureaucratie de la mort. Curriculum Violette est ici reproduit en format bilingue avec une traduction française de Paul Malgrati, poète et universitaire Franco-écossais.