[Lettres à Jean Vuaillat]
This unpublished group of letters was addressed by Léopold Sédar Senghor to Abbé Jean Vuaillat, director of the poetry journal Laudes, which he founded in 1966. Senghor published several previously unpublished poems there, and in 1983 a special issue devoted a biographical and bibliographical essay to the Senegalese poet, still probably the best reference work on the subject.
Christian in inspiration, Senghor’s poetry fit naturally within the editorial line of Laudes, and the affinities between the two men, both aesthetic and spiritual, were genuine. Senghor admired both the editor and the poet in Vuaillat. When Vuaillat published his Mémoires du sablier, the Senegalese President wrote to him: “I loved your poems, inhabited from the very first by the presence of Christ. Yet this does not prevent them from being very modern. And I admired your use of everyday expressions and words, brought to life by analogical images […] And then, […] I discovered that, like me, you had gone to seek poetry in the Kingdom of Childhood.” Senghor always replied to his correspondent with the utmost courtesy and, as far as his political duties allowed, tried to meet his requests: sending books to be inscribed, poems for the journal, a preface, and so on. “I am embarrassed to have taken so long to answer your letter […]. I was away from Dakar from March to June. And then, one after another, I was elected to the Académie française and lost, for the second time, a son.”
After his election to the Académie française in 1983, Senghor sent a touching letter of thanks to the man he now called his “friend.” But from that time on, their collaboration for Laudes became more difficult, as the new academician’s editorial commitments prevented him from supplying Jean Vuaillat’s journal with the short unpublished texts he had previously provided: “[…] as for the poem you are asking me for your journal, I still had some unpublished poems, that is, the first ones I wrote as a student. Unfortunately for you, they have just been published […] by Éditions du Seuil.” Their exchanges, however, never ceased.