Poems - Emile Verhaeren E-Book

Emile Verhaeren

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 154

Beschreibung

Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) who, along with his contemporaries Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Albert Mockel, Charles van Lerberghe and Max Elskamp, helped to define the Symbolist movement, is one of Belgium's most venerated and admired francophone poets. Dubbed the 'European Walt Whitman', he was a pro-European idealist whose poetry explores his all-consuming notion of mankind advancing to a promised land where vital creative energies and new technology could combine to produce a more progressive humanity, a hope ignominiously swept away by the industrial brutality of the First World War. This sympathetic modern translation by Will Stone at last allows the English-speaking world to return to, and reappraise, a major poet whose influence was felt throughout European literary circles during his life-time. Not only does this selection contain some of Verhaeren's most passionate and visionary outpourings but also some of the most tender and beautiful love poems ever written. "My heart is a burning bush that sets my lips on fire..." - Emile Verhaeren

Leseprobe

EMILE VERHAEREN

POEMS

Published by Arc Publications,

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright © Estate of Emile Verhaeren, 2014

Translation copyright © Will Stone, 2014

Introduction copyright © Will Stone, 2014

Preface copyright © Patrick McGuinness, 2014

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2014 Design by Tony Ward 978 1904614 69 2 (pbk)

978 1906570 09 5 (hbk)

978 1908376 55 8 (ebk) Cover photo: Verhaeren standing at the window of his cottage at Caillou-qui-bique, 1914, photo by Charles Bernier. Arc Publications and the translator wish to express special thanks to the Ministère de la Communauté française and the Académie Royal de langue et de la littérature françaises in Brussels for their generous support and patience in the realization of this project. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.‘Arc Classics’ Translation Series – New Translations of Great Poets of the Past

Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

Emile Verhaeren

POEMS

Selected, translated

& introduced by

WILL STONE With a Preface by

PATRICK MCGUINNESS

2014

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection of translations sifted from the prodigious poetic archive of Emile Verhaeren was the result of considerable labour over a prolonged period of time. It demanded the focus and energies not only of myself, but of others whose contribution must here be recognised. My first port of call however is with the various organisations who recognised the case for support towards the realisation of this collection, the first to be published in English since the immediate aftermath of the poet’s death in 1916.

Firstly my gratitude goes to The Society of Authors in London and Arts Council England (East). Their assistance enabled me to carry out extended research into Verhaeren’s life and to procure illustrative materials for the book. In France I was further assisted by the Centre National du Livre (CNL) in Paris. I also had the good fortune to spend a residence at the Centre International des Traducteurs Littéraires (CITL) in Arles to work on the project. Special thanks however must go to their Belgian counterpart, the Collège Européen des Traducteurs Littéraires de Seneffe, and to its president Jacques de Decker and director Françoise Wuilmart, whose faith, generosity and continued hospitality down the years have allowed me to accomplish the task of translation over a number of residences. I should also like to thank Mr Paul Etienne Kisters in the Archives et Musée de la Littérature for his time and trouble in tracking down certain photographs and for enabling me to view Verhaeren’s possessions and personal library, and the courteous staff of the Cabinet des Estampes in the Bibliothèque Royal de Belgique for their expert guidance in the procurement of prints. I am grateful too for the assistance given by Jean Luc Outers, head of the Ministère de la Communauté française department ‘Promotion des Lettres’, and also Entrez-Lire and the Passa Porta international bookshop in Brussels.

A number of individuals also earned my gratitude either for their advice on the texts, with aspects of Verhaeren’s biography, or simply for their sincere support and belief in the importance of bringing Verhaeren’s poetry out of the shadows. They are the following: distinguished scholar of Belgian symbolism, Professor Michel Otten in Brussels, Verhaeren biographer Dr. Beatrice Worthing in England and Dr. Rik Hemmerijckx, inspirational curator of the Museum Emile Verhaeren in Sint Amands. A number

of other individuals must also be thanked for their instinctive rallying around the English Verhaeren. They are Marie-Pierre Devroedt in Brussels for her unselfish assistance and advice on the texts; Michaël Vanderbril and Sven Peeters in Antwerp for their friendship and devotion to the promotion of Belgian literature abroad; Anette Van de Wiele in Bruges for her warm support and tracking down of elusive texts; Professor Emeritus Clive Scott, University of East Anglia, for his perennial belief in the project; Stephen Romer for his fraternal counsel and fin-de-siècle empathies; Paul Stubbs for his enthusiasm and awareness of Verhaeren’s importance in the European canon; and lastly book designer Emma Mountcastle in Devon for her necessary conversion to Verhaerenism and daily administerings of the contents of the original manuscript of Beatrice Worthing’s highly accomplished English biography of the poet. Finally, I should like to thank the Black Herald literary magazine in Paris and The Wolf poetry magazine in England for publishing a number of these Verhaeren translations in advance of the book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

A Note on the Texts

Cuisson du pain

•

Baking Bread

En Hiver

•

In Winter

Aux Moines

•

To the Monks

Londres

•

London

Le Moulin

•

The Windmill

Mourir

•

To Die

Le Gel

•

The Frost

Fleur fatale

•

Fatal Flower

Mes doigts

•

My Fingers

Le Glaive

•

The Blade

La Couronne

•

The Crown

Pieusement

•

Piously

La Révolte

•

The Revolt

Finale – La Morte

•

Finale – The Corpse

La Ville (extrait)

•

The Town (excerpt)

Les Mendiants

•

The Beggars

Chanson de fou

•

Madman’s Song

La Neige

•

The Snow

La Pluie

•

The Rain

Le Vent

•

The Wind

Le Silence

•

The Silence

Le Passeur d’eau

•

The Ferryman

La Plaine

•

The Plain

L’Âme de la ville

•

The Soul of the Town

Les Heures claires I

•

The Clear Hours I

Les Heures claires III

•

The Clear Hours III

Les Heures claires XVIII

•

The Clear Hours XVIII

Une Heure du soir

•

An Evening Hour

Un matin

•

One Morning

Sur les grèves

•

On the Shore

Les Heures d’après-midi X

•

The Afternoon Hours X

Les Heures d’après-midi XXIX

•

The Afternoon Hours XXIX

L’Arbre

•

The Tree

Plus loin que les gares, le soir

•

Further than the Stations, the Evening

Temps gris

•

Grey Weather

Le Péril

•

The Danger

Midi

•

Noon

Le Port déchu

•

The Fallen Port

Au long du quai

•

Along the Quay

Le Navire

•

The Ship

Ténèbres

•

The Darkness

Les Heures du soir VIII

•

The Evening Hours VIII

Les Heures du soir XXVI

•

The Evening Hours XXVI

Les Ombres

•

The Shadows

L’Orage

•

The Storm

Les Morts

•

The Dead

Quartier sinistre

•

Shady Quarter

Novembre est clair et froid

•

November is Clear and Cold

Biographical Notes

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Emile Verhaeren standing at the window of his cottage at Caillou-qui-bique (photo: Charles Bernier, 1914).

Vintage street sign located in the Borinage, Verhaeren Museum, Sint Amands (photo: Will Stone, 2011).

Tomb of Emile and Marthe Verhaeren, Sint Amands, re-landscaped in 2010 (photo: Will Stone, 2011).

Emile Verhaeren in coat, hat and scarf (date and photographer unknown).

Emile Verhaeren in his study at Caillou-qui-Bique (date and photographer unknown).

Emile Verhaeren and Marthe Massin outside their cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique (date and photographer unknown).

First edition of Les Villes tentaculaires, Deman, Bruxelles 1895.

‘The poet Emile Verhaeren walking on the beach’ (etching) by Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), courtesy of Cabinet des Estampes, Brussels.

Verhaeren in a cloak, walking (etching by Charles Bernier, after a drawing by Constant Montald, 1909).

Period photographs by courtesy of the Archive et Musée de la Littérature, Bruxelles and the Museum Emile Verhaeren, Sint Amands.

PREFACE

“Everything in our culture is contrast: we treasure the oppositions that coexist inside us.” Thus Emile Verhaeren in the 1890s, optimistically defining the extraordinary flowering of art, literature and architecture in fin de siècle Belgium. For all his originality, Emile Verhaeren was the product of his place and time: a country barely fifty years old in which the mix of Germanic Flemish and Latinate French created a generation of writers and artists of international significance. Verhaeren, along with his contemporaries Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Albert Mockel, Charles van Lerberghe and Max Elskamp, helped to define the Symbolist movement.

We talk of ‘French’ Symbolism, and we are right, but only insofar as it happened in (and to) the French language. Symbolism was the first consciously ‘francophone’ literary movement, drawing to Paris and Brussels writers from places as diverse as Poland, Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Russia and Latin America. What they all had in common was a sense of what Mallarmé called “le double état de la parole” – “the double state of the word”. It’s a gnomic statement, but Mallarmé expands a little: “brut ou immediate ici, là essentiel” – “raw or immediate here; there essential”. For the Belgians, everything was in a double state – Belgium itself was a ‘double state’ – and Verhaeren and his contemporaries understood that what made them the perfect writers to define Symbolism as both a movement and an approach to poetic language was this consciousness of their own cultural duality.

Like Rodenbach and Maeterlinck, Verhaeren wrote in French, but allowed his Flemish heritage to infiltrate and infuse his poetry. We might say that he used Flemish to de-Latinize his French, which is colourful, rough, often unbridled and houleux, stormy. His poetry works at a mythical and symbolic level, shot through with surprising imagery and extended metaphors, but he is always true to the social realities of his time. Collections such as Les Villes tentaculaires and Les Campagnes hallucinées evoke, in dream-like, sometimes nightmarish, language the radical social and demographic changes of modernity: industrialization, rural depopulation, land-and city-scapes transformed for ever by work but also worklessness, by money, technology, mechanization and the machine-age. This explains in part why he remained such a popular poet among the Socialists and Communists of the twentieth century long after his more rarefied, solipsistic contemporaries had been forgotten.

Verhaeren is always a lyric poet, whether describing the architectural treasures of Flemish béguinages or the broken factory windows of an unnamed industrial city. He is proud of the rich impurity of his language, which is a world and a culture away from the transparent classical rationality of French. Verhaeren’s French is dynamic, instinctive, exclamatory, close to the intimate voice yet also vatic and prophetic. Unlike so many of his Symbolist contemporaries, he is unafraid of the future, and is no surprise that when the Futurists drew up their list of admired predecessors, Verhaeren is chief among them. But he was also a poet of the inner landscape, of the heart and mind, of suffering and isolation and self-torture. Verhaeren was by nature an optimist, especially in his last few books, but even his pessimism is alive and variegated, full of energy and vigour. In ‘The Crown’ he writes “Yes, I too would like my crown of thorns / and one for every thought, red hot, across / my brow, right into my brain, to the frail roots / where sins and forged dreams writhe / within me, through me”. Verhaeren, like Baudelaire, is adept at finding concrete ways of expressing abstract or numinous feelings; and like Baudelaire, he is especially fond of the jarring but memorable simile, the forcible yoking together, with a kind of tender violence, of like and the unlike into an image. We may see the continuation of his voice and vision not just in the work of the Futurists but also in the Expressionist poetry of Germany, where his work was read and admired well into the twentieth century, and into the work of the Surrealists, who learned from his audacious image-making how to satisfy the dual-pull of expressing the inner and the outer worlds.

Verhaeren seems to us, nearly a hundred years after his death, uniquely modern, yet at the same time carrying with him something unreconstructedly romantic: a sense of the poet as visionary, a belief that the poet can include the world and not simply refine it away or stun it with words, and that poetry itself has the appetite not just to observe Progress but to be part of it. These translations stay true to his spirit but also to the élan of his Flemish-inflected French, and carry him across into English admirably.

Patrick McGuinness

INTRODUCTION

“With his own breath Verhaeren enlarged the horizon of the little motherland, and like Balzac with his thankless mild Touraine, he grafted onto the Flemish plains the beautiful human kingdom of his ideality and his art.”

FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN1

“Of Verhaeren one might say that he met this surprising challenge of ‘incarnating a country which did not exist’, of granting it a soul, a great soul, and making it coincide with the universal soul. Emerging from a debilitating terrain, he managed by an extraordinary effort of comprehension and assimilation to become the poet of his century and the mirror of European civilisation.”

JACQUES MARX2

“A dark day, I still remember clearly and will never forget. I took out his letters, his many letters, all of them laid out in front of me, so as to read them, be alone with them, to bring to a close that which was over now, for I knew I would never receive another. And yet I could not. There was something within that prevented me from saying farewell to him who resided in me as proof incarnate of my own existence, of my faith on earth. The more I told myself he was dead, the more I felt how much he lived and breathed in me still and even these words which I am writing to take leave of him have merely revived him. For only the admission of a great loss attests to the true possession of that which must perish and only the unforgettable dead are fully alive in our midst!”

STEFAN ZWEIG3

“My heart is a burning bush that sets my lips on fire…”: this expressively visionary line from a poem by Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s most celebrated and significant poet of the modern age, serves not only to signal an exceptional lyrical gift, but also reveals the strain of his fiery Flemish nature. Born and educated in Flanders but, like his contemporaries, drawn to write in French, the language favoured by the cultured middle classes and intellectual circles of the period, Verhaeren produced a body of work that encompasses the period of Symbolism of the late 1880s and 1890s and also witnesses the first tentative steps of Modernism in a new century. It was this new century and its unprecedented social, technological and scientific eruptions that Verhaeren, more than any other poet of his generation, sought to express in the most truthful lyrical fashion. Although remembered mainly as a poet, Verhaeren was also a prolific playwright and a shrewd art critic. Beyond this he was nothing less than a monumental presence on the stage of Franco-Belgian literature for a quarter of a century, his name at the heart of almost all significant developments in the literary and artistic communities of Brussels and Paris.

Verhaeren was an inveterate traveller and made countless extended journeys into Europe. Spain, Germany and France were his favoured destinations, although it was the teeming metropolis of London that particularly seized his imagination early on and later served as the principal cityscape for Les Villes tentaculaires [The Tentacular Towns], his landmark collection of 1895. In the years preceding the First World War, Verhaeren’s fame as a poet and a speaker snowballed and by the time of his death in 1916, he was translated into twenty languages, his name known not only across Europe but as far as Russia and South America. Verhaeren regularly filled lecture halls in the major cities of Europe, and in Germany, where his profile was enhanced by the strenuous efforts of his dedicated disciple, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, the sales of his poetry were considerable. Fêted by both the Belgian and English royal families, he enjoyed a certain celebrity during the early years of the war as spiritual envoy for a beleaguered Belgium. It was after delivering a speech to the exiled Belgian community in Rouen, in November 1916, that Verhaeren met his death, accidentally falling beneath the train that was to take him back to his home in Paris.

I

Emile Verhaeren was born on 21 May 1855 (the same year as his fellow poet Georges Rodenbach) in the village of Sint Amands situated on a deep bend of the River Scheldt as it winds its way towards Antwerp. These days, Sint Amands is known chiefly as the poet’s resting place – the solemn and imposing black marble tomb containing his and his wife Marthe’s remains holds a prominent place on the river bank – but Verhaeren’s memories of the village and surrounding countryside are vividly present in a number of the poems in this collection. Although he wrote his literary works in French, Verhaeren’s pride in his native Flanders and a sensitivity for its guileless, voluptuous and earthy character, infuse his work.

From 1868 to 1874, Verhaeren attended the noted College Sainte Barbe in Ghent where he became close friends with Georges Rodenbach, later to be the celebrated poet and prose painter of Bruges. Maurice Maeterlinck would also attend this college and go on to pip Verhaeren to the post by winning the Nobel Prize in 1912. Verhaeren was enrolled as a law student from 1875-1881 at the Catholic University of Louvain and although called to the bar, he turned his back on law and became prominent in an avant garde literary movement around a new magazine called La Jeune Belgique, founded in 1881 by the poet Max Waller. The poets and artists who published there declaimed a radical new society which with uncompromising zeal always put creativity first; “art for art’s sake” was its clarion call. Their heroes included Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Daudet and Flaubert. In the same year another review, L’Art moderne