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- Herausgeber: LiteraturPlanet
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Based on selected poems by Paul Verlaine, this booklet gives an overview of important aspects of the poet's life and work. Each chapter begins with an adaptation of a poem by Ilona Lay. On this basis, central elements of Verlaine's poetology and stages of his life reflected in his poetry are discussed.
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Dieter Hoffmann / Ilona Lay
Paul Verlaine in the Mirror of his Poems
A Look at the Life and Work of the Poet
With English Adaptations by Ilona Lay
Literaturplanet
Imprint
© Verlag LiteraturPlanet, 2024
Im Borresch 14
D-66606 St. Wendel
literaturplanet.de/ planet-literature.com
About this book: The life of the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896) was marked by inner conflicts and the futile search for a place in life. This is also re-flected in his poems. Their special musicality, however, radiates the very harmony that was denied the poet in his everyday life.
About Ilona Lay: As the title of her first poetry collection (Versunken/Immersed), published in 2008, suggests, Ilona Lay lives a secluded life. After orienting herself towards classical forms in the early phase of her work, she has switched more to free-rhythm poetry forms in her recent works. This was already evident in her "Meditations on Happiness" (published in 2020 under the title October in the Mountains). The texts of her "Meditations on the Dark Side of Life" (Faces of Death), published in 2022, are also characterised by this.
Information about Dieter Hoffmann can be found on his website (rotherbaron.com) and on Wikipedia.
Cover picture: Frédéric Bazille (1841 – 1870): Portrait of Paul Verlaine (1867); Zurich, Switzerland, Gallery Chichio Haller (Wikimedia Commons)
The life of the French poet Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896) was marked by inner conflicts and the futile search for a place in life. This is also reflected in his poems. Their special musicality, however, radiates the very harmony that was denied the poet in his everyday life.
© LiteraturPlanet, August 2023
About Ilona Lay: As the title of her first poetry collection (Versunken/Immersed), published in 2008, suggests, Ilona Lay lives a secluded life. After orienting herself towards classical forms in the early phase of her work, she has switched more to free-rhythm poetry forms in her recent works. This was already evident in her "Meditations on Happiness" (published in 2020 under the title October in the Mountains). The texts of her "Meditations on the Dark Side of Life" (Faces of Death), published in 2022, are also characterised by this.
Rother Baron is the blogger name of Dieter Hoffmann. Information on the author can be found on his website (rotherbaron.com) and on Wikipedia.
Cover picture: Frédéric Bazille (1841 – 1870): Portrait of Paul Verlaine (1867); Zurich, Gallery Chichio Haller (Wikimedia Commons)
Preface
About this Booklet
Based on selected poems by Paul Verlaine, this booklet gives an overview of important aspects of the poet's life and work. Each chapter begins with an adaptation of a poem by Ilona Lay. On this basis, central elements of Verlaine's poetology and stages of his life reflected in his poetry are discussed.
About the English Adaptations of the Poems
The fact that poems are basically untranslatable has often been pointed out. After all, in this case it is not a matter of transferring the concrete meaning of the words into another language – which also proves problematic often enough.
Through the juggling of word meanings and the interplay of words, rhythm and rhyme, a lyrical work often unfolds a whole web of associations that can hardly be adequately reproduced in a foreign language. This is especially true of poetry like that of Paul Verlaine, which explicitly abstracts from the concrete level of meaning of the words in order to open up a new space of meaning through their interplay.
The decisive factor in this case is therefore not the literal translation of the verses, nor even the exact reproduction of the images, but rather an approximation to the mood evoked by the respective poem. In any case, the aim is not to create a classical translation, but to find an equivalent for the mood of a foreign self, expressed in another language.
The Strangeness of the World. Paul Verlaine's Kaspar Hauser Poetry
In his Kaspar Hauser poem, Verlaine reflects his own inner conflicts and the feeling of having no place in this world in the fate of the famous foundling.
Władysław Ślewiński (1856 – 1918): Orphan
Warsaw, Poland, National Museum (Wikimedia Commons)
Gaspard Hauser chante (Kaspar Hauser Sings)
A speechless orphan, gifted
only with the richness of my tranquil eyes,
that's how I came into the noisy city world.
Its inhabitants did not find me clever.
Matured into a man, the heart inflamed
by an uncertain longing for love,
I sought admittance to the world of women.
But they did not find me beautiful.
Without a home, without a king and without courage,
I felt the wish to sacrifice my life
and jumped into the world of war.
But death rejected me as well.
Was I born too early or too late?
In which world am I at home?
Please pray, pray for this mute,
wounded and orphaned heart!
Paul Verlaine: Gaspard Hauser chante
from: Sagesse (Wisdom; 1880)
Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works), Vol. 1, p. 269 f. Paris 1902: Vanier
Paul Verlaine: A Violent Aesthete
Getting to know Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896) personally would probably not have been very appealing. According to what we know about him, he was an extremely moody, impulsive person who repeatedly drank to excess and even became violent under the influence of alcohol.
His poems, however, speak a different language. They draw the picture of a sensitive, fragile soul, of a person who longs for nothing more than to live in harmony with himself and his environment.
A life full of contradictions ... Perhaps the rift that ran through Verlaine's life, this disconnected juxtaposition of raw everyday life and sensitive poetry, can best be explained with the help of psychoanalysis.
A Psychoanalytical View of Verlaine
In his childhood, Verlaine suffered from an authoritarian father who, as an army officer, did everything in his power to force his son into the corset of a bourgeois life. Probably as a kind of protective reflex against this, Verlaine developed a very close relationship with his mother.
As a result, he later had difficulties in turning his libido to other women: Verlaine obviously had homosexual tendencies. Evidence of this is not only provided by his passionate poetic friendship with Arthur Rimbaud, but also by his later relationship with Lucien Létinois, a pupil whom Verlaine had met as a teacher at a British school.
Nowadays, such a homoerotic inclination would not be problematic. In Verlaine's time, however, it was hardly possible to openly admit to it – especially with the internalised superego of a father obsessed with duty. Thus, Verlaine did not succeed in accepting himself as the person he was.
Unsettled Attitude towards Homosexuality
Instead of seeking support in a stable homoerotic relationship, Verlaine therefore strove to maintain the appearance of a bourgeois life. He even entered into a marriage – tellingly, with a woman who was still a child when he met her, thus presumably arousing more sibling-like feelings in him (which did not prevent him from begetting a son with her, though).
Because he denied his homosexuality – and probably could not even consciously admit to preferring same-sex love –, Verlaine perceived what he rejected in himself as a projection onto others. Instead of coming to terms with himself, he aggressed against all those in whom his inner conflict was reflected: he beat his wife, shot at Rimbaud during a quarrel and physically attacked his mother.
For the shots at Rimbaud, Verlaine was even sentenced to two years in prison. The poems written in this context were collected by Verlaine in the volume Sagesse (Wisdom; 1880). Among them are the verses put into the mouth of Kaspar Hauser.
Kaspar Hauser as a Counterpart of Verlaine
For Verlaine, the story of the young man who, after a life in the darkness of a cellar dungeon, was thrown out into civilisation at the age of 16, was like a mirror image of his own life. It served him to poetically portray the inner conflict underlying his existence - the conflict of a person who, in his inner turmoil, does not know where his place is in the world.
On the other hand, Verlaine could also have seen in the boy, untouched by all civilisation and culture, an image of the spiritual new beginning he dreamed of during his time in prison. Just as the "riches" of the orphan boy consist of nothing but the pure, unspoilt amazement of his "silent eyes", he too probably longed to see himself and the world once again through different eyes.
Inward Dissonance, Outward Harmony
Thus, Verlaine's Kaspar Hauser poem exemplifies his feeling of wandering through his own life like a stranger. The dissonance between his own imperfect life and the utopia of a life in complete harmony with itself is also reflected at the level of the poem – namely in the discrepancy between the content and the formal composition of the verses, which aims for euphony and formal perfection.
This is also taken up in Georges Moustaki's setting of the poem. The "melodic melancholy" that underpins the chanson has, like the sonority of Verlaine's verses, a comforting effect. It is almost reminiscent of the magic of lullabies, which, with their evenly hypnotic sound, carry the restless child away into another, dreamlike world where all discord disappears.
Georges Moustaki (1934 – 2013): Gaspard
from the album Le voyageur (The Traveller, 1969)
Studio recording
Live performance (1969)
More about Kaspar Hauser: The Unlikely Techie: The unsolved mystery of the lost prince. Historyofyesterday.com, January 14, 2021.
The Freedom of the Vagabond. Verlaine's Brussels Graffiti Poems
In 1872, Paul Verlaine left Paris with Arthur Rimbaud, ten years his junior, and led a vagabond life with him for one year. The liberating effect of this escape from bourgeois society is also reflected in Verlaine's poems.
Photomontage with portraits of Verlaine and Rimbaud
cf. Hugfon: Images de Verlaine et Rimbaud; rimbaudphotographe.eu,
September 22, 2020
Bruxelles: Simples fresques (Brussels: Simple Murals)
I
Moistened with the breath of roses,
the slopes and hills fade away,
while in the twilight of the lamps
the unifying wings of darkness blossom.
