Bruges-la-Morte E-Book

Georges Rodenbach

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Bruges-la-Morte, which first appeared in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the 'dead city', becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugues' obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet's novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach's lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges.

Leseprobe

Dedalus European Classics

General Editor: Mike Mitchell

Bruges-la-Morte

Rodenbach

Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns

Translated by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone

With an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst

Published in the UK by Dedalus Ltd,

24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

Email: info@ dedalusbooks.com

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 82 6

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 20 8

Dedalus is distributed in the USA and Canada by SCB Distributors,

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected] web: www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd,

58 Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai N.S.W. 2080

email: [email protected]

Dedalus is distributed in Canada by Marginal Distribution,

695 Westney Road South, Suite 14 Ajax, Ontario, L16 6M9

email: [email protected] web site: www.marginalbook.com

Publishing History

First published in France in 1892

First published by Dedalus in 2005, reprinted 2007 and 2009

First e-book edition 2011

Introduction to Bruge-la-Morte copyright © Alan Hollinghurst 2005

Translation of Bruges-la-Morte copyright © Mike Mitchell

Translation of The Death Throes of Towns copyright © Will Stone 2005

Introduction to The Death Throes of Towns and photos of Bruges copyright © Will Stone 2005

The right of mike Mitchell to be identified as the translator of Bruges-la-Morte and Will Stone to be identified as the translator of The Death Throes of Towns have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty.

He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won the prize in 2004.

He lives in London.

MIKE MITCHELL

Mike Mitchell is a distinguished literary translator and one of Dedalus’s editorial directors, with responsibility for the translation programme.

For Dedalus he has translated the novels of Gustav Meyrink, Herbert Rosendorfer, Johann Grimmelshausen and Hermann Ungar as well as translating and editing The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy.

For other publishers his translations include detective novels by Friedrich Glauser, plays and poems by Oskar Kokoschka, the essays of Adolf Loos and the memoirs of Erwin Blumenfeld.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Prize.

WILL STONE

Will Stone is a poet, translator and literary journalist. His translation work includes Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval and Selected Poems of Georg Trakl to be published by Arc in 2005.

His poems have appeared in Agenda, the London Magazine and a number of other journals. He has contributed reviews to the TLS, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Poetry Review, PNR, and Modern Poetry in translation.

CONTENTS

Part 1

Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst to Bruges-la-Morte

Prefatory note

Bruges-la-Morte

Part 2

Introduction by Will Stone to The Death Throes of Towns

The Death Throes of Towns

Rodenbach Remembered?

A Note on the Photographs

Acknowledgements

PART 1

INTRODUCTION

The Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855–98) is identified above all with the city of Bruges. It emerged early on as a subject in his poetry, and in his most famous book, the short novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a particular idea of the place – silent, melancholy, lost in time – found its most intense and influential expression. It led to something of a cult of Bruges in the Parisian circles that Rodenbach was by then inhabiting. Bruges became a destination, treasured for its antiquity and decay, and Rodenbach’s novel, illustrated as it was with numerous photographs of the city’s churches, houses and canals, itself sold very well there, as a souvenir of a particular aesthetic vision of the place. In the following years other Belgian artists explored the richly desolate atmosphere of the city, and Fernand Khnopff, in particular, made a number of mesmerising paintings which combine photographic precision with a mood of lonely Symbolist contemplation. As it happened, it was a moment when there was talk of reopening the city to the modern world after centuries of decline brought about by the silting-up of its old sea-canal (the new port of Zeebrugge would be the result). Many Brugeois resented seeing the epithet Morte attached to a city seeking a new commercial life. Rodenbach would address these dilemmas, and the possible desecration of his dream-Bruges, in his last novel Le Carilloneur (1897). Was the place to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death?

Rodenbach, as apologist for the beautiful death, was seen by Parisians as himself a sort of emanation of the city. In a memoir written by Paul and Victor Margueritte, who met him at Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings, he appears as a distinctly ‘northern’ type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and ‘blue-grey eyes – the mirror of his native skies – those eyes so deep and distant, the colour of the canals that they had long reflected, the colour of still water and moving sky’. In 1895 the French painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer produced an extraordinary portrait of Rodenbach, placing him in spectral close-up against a background of the city’s roofs and gables, with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. The writer’s grey shoulders seem to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. Rodenbach was an elegant, almost dandyish dresser, but Lévy-Dhurmer shows him with his shirt collar undone and with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief. Anyone who has read Bruges-la-Morte is likely to see this as a kind of double portrait, of the author and of his bereaved and obsessive hero, Hugues Viane, haunting the deserted quays, in strange subjection to his chosen city.

In the little preface which Rodenbach wrote to explain the inclusion of photographs in the book, he describes Hugues’s story as ‘a study of passion’ whose ‘other principal aim’ is the evocation of a Town, not merely as a backdrop, but as an ‘essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act’. The photographs are intended to help readers themselves to ‘come under the influence of the Town, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close to, experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers’. This elaboration of mere atmosphere into a principle of action is certainly the central curiosity and mystery of the novel; though it may seem odd that the author should have wanted to supplement his own verbal atmosphere, in all its obscure Symbolist refinement, with the illustrations of a Baedeker.

One needs to look at Rodenbach’s own life to understand why the city was able to assume this power of suggestion for him. His connexion with it was aptly both indirect and suggestive. Though Flemish, he was not himself Brugeois. His father was, and it is surely significant for the son’s work that he spoke constantly of the place to his children; but Georges was born in Tournai, and grew up in Ghent, also a richly historic city, but one which had adapted itself to the possibilities of modern industry and commerce (Rodenbach père was an inspector of weights and measures). Georges was educated at the Jesuit Collège de Sainte-Barbe, as were his exact contemporary and friend Emile Verhaeren, who was to become the leading Flemish poet of the period, and Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish writer who was to gain the most international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1911. (All of them, as members of the educated bourgeoisie, spoke and wrote in French.) Like Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, Rodenbach studied law at the University of Ghent; he then went, in the autumn of 1878, to spend a year as a young barrister in Paris. Once there he immersed himself in a literary culture which seemed to him a luxuriant antithesis to the sterility of Belgium. As he wrote to Verhaeren: ‘As for producing literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above all positivistic and material. It won’t hear a word of poetry … Whereas in Paris, one lives at twice the pace, one is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap rises and thought flowers.’ Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, characteristically titled Les Tristesses.

Back home, he worked for a further ten years in the law but involved himself more and more in the emerging new movement in Belgian literature, as reviewer, essayist and poet. His fourth collection of poems, La Jeunesse blanche, published in 1886, was the one in which he himself felt he attained maturity; it is certainly the one in which the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, explored in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation, is established: ‘To live like an exile, to live seeing no one / In the vast abandonment of a dying town, / Where nothing is heard but the vague rumour / Of a sobbing organ or a chiming belfry’ (‘Alone’, from the sequence ‘Soirs de province’.) Silence, he later said, was the thread connecting all his work, his poems being décors de silence, his novels études d’êtres de silence. The bells that measure out the silence were also to be a recurrent motif, in his poems, in Bruges-la-Morte, and of course in Le Carillonneur, where the great carillon of Bruges seems to voice the subconscious of the Flemish people.

In 1888 Rodenbach left Belgium for good, and spent the remaining ten years of his life in Paris. Here was the real exile, gladly embraced, and doubly rewarding. He married, wrote, as a kind of two-way interpreter of French and Belgian culture, for both Le Journal de Bruxelles and Le Figaro, and became a figure – discreet, kindly and punctilious – in Parisian literary life. He was a friend of Mallarmé, whom he revered, of Daudet, the Goncourt brothers, and became close to the proto-Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, then in the last year of his life. And as his career flowered in Paris, the Flemish subject, the almost mystical nostalgia for Bruges, crystallised for him. The indefinable mood of his poetry, generated from recurrent imagery of empty provincial Sundays, solitude, autumn and winter nightfall, took on a larger fictional form in the light of distance. Rather like A. E. Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on Hampstead Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his Paris apartment. ‘One only truly loves what one no longer has’, he wrote. ‘Truly to love one’s little homeland, it is best to go away, to exile oneself for ever, to surrender oneself to the vast absorption of Paris, and for the homeland to grow so distant it seems to die. […] The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.’

Such a dream dominates Hugues Viane, who finds in the dead city of Bruges a perfect setting in which to grieve for his dead wife. Rodenbach, in his quiet way the most monomaniac of writers, seems to have found in the unworldly Hugues the persona who could best embody his own obsession. At the opening of the story we see him, a widower of five years, setting out from his big old silent house for one of his solitary walks. Of the house itself we learn little, except that in its drawing-room are the mementoes of his wife, the pictures of her, and the long tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case. Hugues, at the age of forty, has made a religion of his sorrow. If in his leisure and sensibility he seems the type of the aesthete, he is a peculiar one, set on the exclusion of all excitement, and on the narrowing of his aesthetic experience to one purpose, the cult of his dead wife. Everywhere he finds analogies to her and to his feelings about her, in the rain, the bells, the canals, until the whole city comes mysteriously to resemble her, to be imbued, as it were, with her absence. He sees intensely but selectively, his eyes being ‘fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself’.

This beautiful and refined analysis of grief is the stuff of a Rodenbach poem, but even a short novel needs an element of action, and it is this that is precipitated in the second chapter. Out on his evening walk Hugues turns over thoughts of suicide and of mystical religion, goes into Notre Dame, where he is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, and then out in the street again sees his dead wife: not the etherealised figure identified with the dead city, but a living woman, apparently her exact likeness. Hugues, himself unwittingly a legend of fidelity in the town, follows her, and then loses her; but we see that an insidious temptation has crossed his path. The pursuit is resumed a week later, when he sees her and follows her again, this time into a theatre, where, conspicuous in mourning, he takes his place in the stalls, unable to see the woman in the audience, and barely aware of what is to be performed.