Transcript

Hey, it's Slowdown producer Myka Kielbon. We all need to take a moment to pause. Here at the show, we realized we know some pretty amazing poetry lovers who have their own Slowdown moments to share with you. Chefs, musicians, journalists, and more. These late summer Wednesdays, we're bringing you their selections. We hope you enjoy.

I'm Jacques Pepin, and this is The Slowdown.

My mother had a little restaurant when I was seven, eight years old, so, you know, I started working. My father disappeared, he went into resistance during the Second World War. So, my mother was at home. Our house in Bourg-en-Bresse, where I come from, was bombed. Was bombed three times, actually. And three times we were not there. We were in the garden with my grandmother and all that. But the house was partially destroyed.

But the point is that my father would come, you know, trying to sneak out of the woods somewhere, and to spend a day with us in town. And each time he came, the house was destroyed. He didn't know. He had no way of knowing. There was no telephone or anything. So he finds that out from some cousin, and so forth. So it was a pretty tough time. And then I left home when I was 13 to go into formal apprenticeship.

Life was, in a sense, easier for a kid. I mean, my father was a cabinetmaker, my mother was a cook, so I was going to be a cabinetmaker or a cook. This is it — never thought I could be, I don't know, a doctor or a lawyer or… So, uh, this was the way life was. But happy life too. Food is only the expression of one moment in time. You do a recipe, you know, that recipe remains, but certainly, the remembering of food is very visceral, is very powerful.

You know, you give me the chicken with cream sauce my mother did, and my eyes closed, I say, that's my chicken. You know, so those memories are very visceral, you know, coming back from school. For us, certainly, we sit down in the kitchen, you hear the voice of your mother, the voice of your father, the smell of the kitchen, you know, the cling of the instruments and so forth. And basically those are very powerful memories, which stay with you the rest of your life. Yes. After the hot summer and before the hard winter, there is a certain — plenitude, you know, a certain tranquility to the fall which leads yourself to remembering and to thinking about the past and so forth.

Today's poem is a French classic, one that countless schoolchildren have learned to recite over the decades. It strings us together in a song of feeling, a song of remembering.

Autumn Song
by Paul Verlaine, translated by Arthur Symons

When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long

Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours toll deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over,
And I weep.

And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.

Chanson d’automne
by Paul Verlaine

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Jacques Pépin is a French chef, author, culinary educator, television personality, and artist who has appeared on American television, has written for The New York Times and Food & Wine and has authored more than 30 cookbooks. He has been honored with 24 James Beard Foundation Awards, five honorary doctoral degrees, the American Public Television's lifetime achievement award, the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019 and the Légion d'honneur, France's highest order of merit, in 2004. In 2016, with his daughter, Claudine Pépin and his son-in-law, Rollie Wesen, Pépin created the Jacques Pépin Foundation to support culinary education for adults with barriers to employment.