The first evening
The poem Première soirée (German "The First Evening") is a poem by the then sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud , which was deposited with a publisher in 1870 with other poems, entered the so-called collection of the “Cahiers de Douai” and accepted at the author's request was not published in his lifetime. It was first reprinted on Sunday, November 29, 1891, 20 days after Rimbaud's death, in the literary magazine Gil Blas .
Première soirée
| French | German |
|---|---|
|
Elle était fort déshabillée |
She didn't have much left on her body. |
history
After his first escape from August 29 to September 5, 1870, Rimbaud was picked up in Aiguerande by his rhetoric teacher Georges Izambard . He lived in Douai for about fifteen days with his aunts, the ladies Gindre. In the hope of being published, Rimbaud deposited on September 26 or 27, 1870 with the poet and publisher Paul Demeny in Douai a first bundle of loose sheets with fifteen poems, including "première soirée".
Rimbaud used another stay in Douai in October to deliver seven new sonnets to Demeny after a second escape from the mother-dominated house . He later wrote to him: "Burn it, I want it, and I believe that you will respect my will, like that of a dead man, burn all the verses that I foolishly entrusted to you during my stay in Douai." Demeny did so Not. Five of Rimbaud's poems are only known through this collection. This poem on a loose sheet of paper in the bundle of so-called “Douai booklets”, which is usually the first to be printed in their published versions, was not published during Rimbaud's lifetime.
Demeny sold the collection to Rodolphe Darzens , the poet's first biographer who did not know him personally. It then came into the hands of the publisher Léon Genonceaux , the collector Pierre Dauze and those of Stefan Zweig , who bought it at an auction in the Hôtel Drouot in 1914 and kept it in Petrópolis in Brazil until his death in 1942 . Zweig's parents-in-law donated Zweig's collection of manuscripts to the British Library in London in 1985 , where they are kept to this day. These poems have since been published as facsimiles .
shape
The poem has 8 stanzas of four lines each with cross rhyme . It begins and ends with two identical stanzas, whereby a few minimal variants of the typography (dashes) in the various text editions may be due to the respective editor, printer or corrector . The form of the poem itself generally corresponds to the rules of classical French poetry. The meter consists entirely of Achtsilblern ( octosyllabes ). However, there are sentences that are longer than the verse , which allows the typical rhythm of the verse to be broken.
interpretation
It is noticeable among the texts of the Cahiers that some refer to women in different forms ( Vénus Anadyomène , Les réparties de Nina , Roman ).
The poem begins and ends with two - almost - identical stanzas : a bizarre landscape with a female being; “Fort déshabillée” suggests a girl who, as it were, tore off her clothes while indiscreet trees crowd curiously against the window pane. At the same time, Rimbaud plays here with the ambiguity of the word “fort”. This can mean “strong”, “vehement”, but also “fortress” as a noun. Here it is necessary to take a fortress, that of women, femininity and their charms, which the author, in his youthful helplessness, meets with an allegory, yes, with a certain uptightness. The trees. His gaze wanders out of the window to the familiar, to the hoard of boyish play. And in order to be able to cope with the clearly erotic situation, by means of the trees he again concentrates away from the actual sex and the now imminent act towards the leaves of the trees. They shed their leaves and land at the girl's feet, the veins of which are similar to those of the leaves, “so tender, so tender” ( si fins, si fins ). This indefinite uncertainty remains, repeated forever in our dealings with femininity, an eternally recurring loop of conquering and surrendering to the suddenly naked woman and her gender. The last four lines repeat the youthful man's fear. The woman, a sexually attractive being who is frightening. The last four lines repeat the youthful man's fear. At the same time, the last verse expresses a promise and a longing: the first love, an eternal attempt. The refrain is supposed to make us smarter.
In this poem, Rimbaud also takes up his favorite motifs breast, refuge and the flower immondices (for example: flower garbage). In the picture of the breast, “Fly to the Rose”, the allusion to the breast has emotional value. It is the child who is deprived of tenderness, who symbolically feels weaned. This breast, which fascinates him in the first few texts and especially in this poem, is then rejected with the mean words nipple, nipple. The unusual "rose fly" gives this flower a connotation of putrefaction, which confirms the assimilation of the flower to the flesh. In the description of the half-naked girl we also find an allegory of the transition to the biographical frustrations and disappointments of the writer (especially through the mother). Nevertheless, the tone becomes sentimental when he speaks by analogy of half-naked country.
Text output (selection)
- Arthur Rimbaud: Poésies. Une season enfer. Illuminations et autres textes. Préface de Paul Claudel . Édition établie by Pascal Pia . Paris: Gallimard 1960.
- Arthur Rimbaud: Les Cahiers de Douai (Poésies) . Paris: Hatier 2018. (Collection Classiques & Cie Lycée.) ISBN 978-2-401-04717-4
Translations
For all fundamental problems in translating lyric poetry into a foreign language, there are a number of versions of the Première soirée in German, English and some other European languages, namely within partial or complete editions of Rimbaud's works or anthologies of French poetry.
- German translations
From the beginning of the 1890s one began to deal with the transmission of Rimbaud's work in Germany. An early German version of the poems comes from Karl Anton Klammer , a former Austrian officer who translated Rimbaud during his military service in Galicia and had the book published in Leipzig in 1907 with an introduction by Stefan Zweig under the pseudonym FK Lammer.
Another German version of the poem was published in Leipzig in 1927. “The collected work of Jean-Arthur Rimbaud in a free German adaptation by Paul Zech ” was published in a heavily revised version in 1944 and was reprinted several times. B. 1963 at dtv and 1990 at Argon Verlag .
The latest transmission is in the edition "Arthur Rimbaud: Poesies" edited by Michael Fisch , published in 2015 by Verlag Schiler, Berlin. The arrangement of the poems largely follows the chronology of the critical edition by Steve Murphy, published by Honoré Champion Éditeur in Paris in 1999.
- English translations
The American Louise Varese (1890–1989), who has made a contribution to the translation of new French literature into English, was the first to translate Rimbaud, but not the Soirée première . The first English translation of the poem appeared in 1962 in the bilingual edition “Rimbaud. The Poems ”with prose translations by Oliver Bernard. "Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters" followed in 1966, edited and translated by Wallace Fowley, with a revised edition in 2005. Other translators of the poem are Martin Sorrell (2001), Dennis J. Carlile (2001), Wyatt Mason (2003) and AS Kline (2003; 2008). By Ezra Pound adaptations come from a total of five poems of Rimbaud, including première soirée . They are printed in "The Translations of Ezra Pound" (New York 1963).
Recordings
- Arthur Rimbaud: Première soirée . Voiced by Michael Mansour, on youtube
- Arthur Rimbaud: First evening . Voiced by Frank Streffing , on youtube
Reception in pop music
There are two different settings of the poem by Christophe Bourdoiseau on the albums Tant de saisons perdues (2008) and La mort du loup (2011). The French fusion group Barrio Populo begins their album Cris d'écrits with a setting of the poem under the title Comédie en trois baisers (2017).
Individual evidence
- ^ Arthur Rimbaud, Première soirée Edition-Originale.com, accessed on May 16, 2018
- ↑ Arthur Rimbaud - Lyrics: Première Soirée + German translation , accessed on May 15, 2018
- ^ Archive Paul Demeny / Dossier de Douai (1870) , accessed on May 15, 2018
- ^ Lettre de Arthur Rimbaud à Paul Demeny, 10 June 1871 full text
- ^ British Library: Western Manuscripts. Stefan Zweig Collection: Music, literary and historical manuscripts (1538–1936). MS 181
- ↑ Mario Zanucchi: Transfer and Tradition. The French symbolists in German-language poetry in modern times. (1890-1923). Berlin: de Gruyter 2016. Chapter 2.
- ↑ Friedrich Denk. Breaking out into the imagination. (Review) in: Zeit online, October 18, 1963, accessed on May 18, 2018
- ↑ Poems. The first evening
- ^ The First Evening by Arthur Rimbaud , accessed May 21, 2018.
- ^ Allmusic.com , accessed May 23, 2018.
- ↑ Label Phonector 4260095742971
- ↑ discdogs.com , accessed on May 23, 2018th