Life and career

Jacques Roubaud was a professor of Mathematics at University of Paris X Nanterre.

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.[1]

Roubaud's fiction often suppresses the rigorous constraints of the Oulipo (while
mentioning their suppression, thereby indicating that such constraints are indeed
present), 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.
The Great Fire of London (1989), The Loop (1993), and Mathematics (2012) are the
first three volumes of a long, experimental, autobiographical work known as "the
project" (or "the minimal project"), and the only volumes of "the project", at
present, to have been translated into English. Seven volumes of "the project" have
been completed and published in French. To compose The Loop, Roubaud began with a
childhood memory of a snowy night in Carcassonne and then wrote nightly, without
returning to correct his writing from previous nights. Roubaud's goals in writing
The Loop were to discover, "My own memory, how does it work?", and to "destroy" his
memories through writing them down.[1]

Roubaud has participated in readings and lectures at the European Graduate School
(2007), the Salon du Livre de Paris (2008), and the "Dire Poesia" series at Palazzo
Leoni Montanari in Venice (2011).[2][3]

He married Alix Cléo Roubaud in 1980; she died three years later.[4]