Paul-Louis Couchoud

Paul-Louis Couchoud (French: [kuʃu]), was born on July 6, 1879, at Vienne, Isère and died there on April 8, 1959. He was a French philosopher, a graduate from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a physician, a man of letters, and a poet. He became well known as an adapter of Japanese haiku into French, an editor of Reviews, a translator, and a writer promoting the German thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus Christ.

In 1898, Paul-Louis Couchoud entered the École Normale Supérieure (at 45, rue d'Ulm, Paris, called "ENS rue d'Ulm"), a special college-level institute in Paris for French elite students in arts and sciences selected every year through a national competition. He graduated in 1901 as an “agrégé” (lecturer) in philosophy. The French degree is not directly comparable to an American one, as it is granted to a few dozens of top-ranked students in a national competition held once a year.

Couchoud obtained a scholarship from the banker Albert Kahn. This grant allowed Couchoud to visit Japan (Sept. 1903 - May 1904), a country which became a passion. During a trip on French canals by barge (1905), Couchoud and his two friends, sculptor Albert Poncin and painter André Faure, composed haiku in French. They published their work anonymously in a limited edition (30 copies) of Au fil de l'eau (Along the waterways), a collection of free-verse tercets which was well received. It still is considered one of the most successful adaptations of haiku in French. Couchoud also studied and translated Japanese Haijin (Yosa Buson in particular) in Les Épigrammes lyriques du Japon (Lyrical Epigrams of Japan, 1906).

Couchoud made later two more trips to Japan and China, from which resulted his collection Sages et poètes d’Asie (published as Japanese Impressions, 1920). In 1955, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote: "I have never met P. L. Couchoud, but one of his books, Sages et poètes d'Asie, which I still have in a hardback edition on my bookshelves in Northeast Harbor, may have been the first work through which I encountered Asian poetry and thought. I was fifteen then, and I still know by heart some haiku translated or adapted by him; this exquisite book was for me the equivalent of a half-open door. It has never closed. How much would I have loved to go and visit P. L. Couchoud with you, and thank the sick poet for all what he made me feel or resonate".

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