The megara of the sea

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The megara of the sea is a long poem by the French writer Louis-René des Forêts . The poem, first published in 1965 in Le Mercure de France magazine, is, according to the author, a version of a fragment from an abandoned novel project.

content

The poem visually describes the transition from childhood to adulthood. The basic setting is a feast of ugly old women, the " megaren ", who are watched by a child. The child is at the same time deterred and attracted by the spectacle that takes place on the seashore, where the whipped sea meets the rocky coast and the spray splatters as "foam squads" and "piebald horses".

shape

Although kept in an epic tone, the text does not follow a linear development like an epic and the individual scenes are more subject to a circular structure. The extensive stanzas resemble the laisse, i.e. H. originally long stanzas of a medieval chanson de geste , mainly connected by assonance . The poem does not follow any rhyme scheme or any fixed metric, the rhythm always seems to just miss the Alexandrian .

intertextuality

Numerous references to other texts can be made. Pictorial thematic (shore, threat of the foaming water ...) for example to des Forêts' own 1943 novel Les Mendiants (Eng. »The Beggars« ) or to the beach walk chapter in Ulysses by Joyce. The title Mégères de la mer is taken from a French translation by Finnegans Wake . According to the Forêts, the formal design was inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins ' long poem The Wreck of the Germany .

Origin and publication history

The basis for the megara of the sea is a fragment from an abandoned novel by Louis-René des Forêts. A note on the magazine version of the poem from 1965 states that it is "one of the versions of the fragment," so that further versions can be assumed. In fact, Jean Roudaut speaks of a kind of intermediate version of the Megaras , which was not only in verse but also rhymed. The text known today would therefore be the result of the destruction or overcoming of the rhyme scheme in favor of a less strict but extremely complex form. In 1967 the poem was published with only minor changes compared to the magazine version as a » plaquette «, ie a narrow brochure, by the publisher Mercure de France .

reception

In his monograph on the reception of the texts by des Forêts, Marc Comina criticizes those currents that read the work one-sidedly with a view to silencing the author or the silence of the language - a reading that Comina describes as a "myth" erroneously due to There were longer pauses in writing in the Forêts and only pay attention to individual passages in the text. According to Comina, the megäres of the sea fell into a phase of consolidation of the myth within literary criticism and would also represent the last published text before a longer publication pause.

Editions and translation

  • "Les Mégères de la mer", in: Le Mercure de France , 1220 (1965), pp. 193-201.
  • Les Mégères de la mer , Paris: Mercure de France 1967.
  • Les Mégères de la mer suivi de Poèmes de Samuel Wood , préface de Richard Millet, Paris: Gallimard 2008.
  • Die Megär des Meeres , edited and translated by Jonas Hock, Vienna / Berlin: Turia + Kant 2014.

literature

  • Yves Bonnefoy, "Une écriture de notre temps", in: ders., La Vérité de parole , Paris: Mercure de France 1988, pp. 115-259.
  • Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere , edited and translated by Marco Gutjahr, Vienna / Berlin: Turia + Kant 2014.
  • Marc Comina, Louis-René des Forêts: L'impossible silence , Seyssel: Champ Vallon 1998.
  • Jonas Hock, “To be sprayed, become the sea, become a poem. Notes on Louis-René des Forêts' Die Megären des Meeres «, epilogue in: Louis-René des Forêts, Die Megären des Meeres , edited and translated by Jonas Hock, Vienna / Berlin: Turia + Kant 2014, pp. 41–61.
  • Dominique Rabaté, Louis-René des Forêts: la voix et le volume , Paris: José Corti 1991.
  • Jean Roudaut, Louis-René des Forêts , Paris: Seuil 1995.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See "Les Mégères de la mer", in: Le Mercure de France , 1220 (1965), pp. 193–201, here: 201.
  2. ↑ Die Megär des Meeres , edited and translated by Jonas Hock, Vienna / Berlin: Turia and Kant 2014, p. 11.
  3. ↑ Cf. Jonas Hock, »Gischt-Werden, Meer-Werden, Gedicht-Werden. Notes on Louis-René des Forêts' Die Megären des Meeres «, epilogue in: Louis-René des Forêts, Die Megären des Meeres , edited and translated by Jonas Hock, Vienna / Berlin: Turia and Kant 2014, pp. 41–61, here: 48ff.
  4. ↑ "Les Mégères de la mer," in Le Mercure de France , 1220 (1965), pp 193-201, here: two hundred and first
  5. ↑ See Jean Roudaut, "Des propriétés sonores d'une étendue insoupçonnée", in: Revue des Science Humaines , 249 (1991), pp. 19–33.
  6. ↑ Cf. Marc Comina, Louis-René des Forêts: L'impossible silence , Seyssel: Champ Vallon 1998, pp. 32–41.