Jean Tardieu (1903-95) was born in Saint-Germain-de-Joux, a small village in the French Jura. His father, Victor Tardieu, was a successful painter, influenced by the Post-Impressionists but producing large-scale representations of working-class life and huge decorative ceilings for town halls. His mother Câline was a musician. These two artistic influences were important in the development of Jean Tardieu's work. In 1904 the family moved to Paris, where their comfortable bourgeois life later came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of war while Victor Tardieu was serving with the French army at the Front and he lived with his mother in reduced circumstances.
His poems were first published in 1927 in the prestigious magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française. Around that time he switched his studies from Law to Letters, and arranged to do his deferred National Service in Hanoi, where he met Marie-Laure Blot, a brilliant young botanist (later Assistant Director of Research at the Jardin des Plantes), whom he was to marry in 1932 on his return to Paris. His collection of poems, Accents, was published by Gallimard just before the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he was actively involved with the literary Resistance, giving work to clandestine magazines and publishers, and involved with other Resistance writers, including Aragon, Éluard, Seghers, Queneau, Lucian Scheler, Henri Thomas, and above all André Frénaud, with whom he entered into a close friendship.
After the liberation of Paris, in 1944, he was appointed Head of the Drama Department for French Radio, moving into the field of experimental radio productions in 1946 and working with figures such as Claudel, Braque, Jean-Louis Barrault and Bachelard. He published Les dieux étouffés, a collection of clandestine poems written during the war years, and Jours pétrifiés (1947), the first attempts at a new form of writing. And in 1949 he began to gain recognition as a dramatist with the production, by René Guillette, of Qui est là? and the performance, by Agnès Capri with Michel de Ré, of the comic sketch Un mot pour un autre, which was to have a lasting success. In the coming years, this reputation was to grow, and Tardieu's work in this field was to be linked with the names of Beckett and Ionesco as a example of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd.
With the composer Marius Constant, he was responsible for setting a a new radio station which was to become France Musique. During the 1950 and 60s he published many volumes of prose, theatre, poetry and texts on music and the visual arts while still working for radio and television until his retirement from ORTF in 1969. His later work includes a book of biographical reminiscences, On vient chercher Monsieur Jean (1990).
In 1991 Bloodaxe published David Kelley's translation of his work, The River Underground: Selected Poetry & Prose, a dual-language French-English edition including the sequence Space and the Flute (1958), which Tardieu wrote for drawings by his friend Pablo Picasso. Their poems and drawings are reproduced together in this edition with Kelley's English translations.
