In the island of Patmos, where Jacques Lacarrière (1925-2005) lived at the end of the 1960s, he had the idea of ​​”writing texts on ancient mythology perceived and rendered in a modern way”, he would call them “mythograms and the first of these was the tasty imaginary interview of the author of L’Été grec with Icarus himself! This is one of the joys offered by the reissue of L’Envol d’Icare, by Seghers editions, thirty years after its publication, with an enlightening preface by the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet, friend of the skies and Jacques Lacarrière – in 2005, he presented him with Euclid’s staff, a trophy dedicated to the transmission of knowledge between generations of scholars and scholars.

“You take me for the first of the aviators but I never had anything from an aviator, confides Icarus to Lacarrière. I put on wings. I flew away. I experienced the intoxication of the azure, the burning of the sun and then I fell, that’s all. That’s all, but this intoxication is essential to the myth of the ever-renewed birdman, as Lacarrière shows in this book. Because it testifies in human beings to both the desire for transgression (to approach the gods) and the thirst to dominate technique. And on this subject, Lacarrière takes us back to Ovid and his Metamorphoses to know everything about the wings whose feathers were glued with wax by the ingenious Daedalus on the back of his son so that he could escape from the labyrinth of the Minotaur. With their instructions: “Do not fly too high or too low. »

Proving that “one can ascend to heaven while being only a man”, Icarus embodies, by going beyond the paternal instruction, the temptation of excess (Greek hubris). Following the “track” of Icarus, Lacarrière brings together in this essay in the form of a walk the different versions of the myth over the ages, its representations, from Bruegel to Picasso, its gloss, from Lucien de Samosate to Rousseau via Paul Diel, to whom he reproaches his ignorance and his incompetence! All the keys to deciphering the myth, including through psychoanalysis, are brought together by the cheerfully knowledgeable storyteller, who cannot resist the final pilgrimage to the island… of Ikaria.

Ferryman. It is exciting, invigorating, erudite and educational. It’s personal, too, since Lacarrière was the ferryman of anchorites, gnostics and other extreme enthusiasts all his life. Above all, writes Lacarrière to Icarus, “your fall served as an example not for those who dreamed of flying but for those who live without dreams”, a fundamental admission of a protean writer, who is also of all times, playing with Chronos , and who never gave up on the ultimate dream: poetry. Of course, Icarus also appears in the Love Dictionary of Greece – in the top 10 sales of this collection of Plon and once again reissued in paperback. The writer takes us there starting with the A of “Acathiste” (from the Greek acathistos, “not seated”), because this hymn to the Virgin, “unmarried wife”, “horticulturist of delights”, who would have saved Constantinople , it is said, was performed standing. Composed in the year 626, it comes to us in its translation – Lacarrière was also an immense translator from Sophocles to Cavafy, via Andreas Embirikos, an unknown surrealist. And this is only an appetite for the literary corpus of this shared dictionary “on the way”, full of humor, which closes at the Z like Zorba. Among the places dear to Jacques Lacarrière, we find the island of Spetses, off the coast of which his ashes were scattered, and which he describes as follows: “The center of the world once passed through this place […]. The center of the world is wherever myth meets history and where history meets legend. The center of the world is wherever the eyes and the hand of man transform history and stone into a smile. And who did it better than Lacarrière, his lifelong work, and his winged pen, such as we find in L’Envol d’Icare? §

“The Flight of Icarus”, by Jacques Lacarrière (Seghers, 160 p., €19). “Dictionary of lovers of Greece” (Plon, L’Abeille, 679 p., €14). cheminsfaire.org/site/

Jacques Lacarrière, coll. personal/Sylvia Lacarrière – Chemins Faisant (x2) – coll. personal Sylvia Lacarrière/Chemins Faisant