Poet, playwright, novelist, René de Obaldia died this Thursday, January 27, at the age of 103. He is a discreet author of great humor that disappears, biting and caustic at the same time.
” The death ? Provided that I arrive until there liked to say René de Obaldia, bursting out laughing, making Jean Paulhan’s quip his own, with a humor that he never departed from.
Born in Hong Kong to a Panamanian father and a French mother, he arrived in France as a baby and did all his schooling in Paris. Seized with a passion for the German Romantics as a teenager, he decided very early on to become a poet. He published his first collection of poetry, Middayin 1949. There followed other stories in poetic prose and three novels, including The century, in 1959, but it is towards the theater that he turns definitively and by accident, he admits.
Because to earn a living, René de Obaldia became in 1952 secretary general of the cultural center of Royaumont. To amuse the audience at the abbey, he wrote an impromptu, The deceased, where a young widow recounts the existence of the dearly departed. The text was published in 1961 in the collection Seven impromptu at leisure. Then followed several plays, including his great success Wind in the sassafras branches. The world of literature today loses with René de Obaldia a great spirit close to Raymond Queneau, facetious and funny.
► To read also: [Portrait] René de Obaldia: “the immortal” academician author of “Perles de vie”
► To read also: Tribute to René de Obaldia