Eugene Jolas

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John George Eugene Jolas , also Eugène Jolas, (born October 26, 1894 in Union City , New Jersey , † May 26, 1952 in Paris ) was an American journalist and poet . In Paris he edited the literary magazine transition from 1927 to 1938 .

life and work

Eugene Jolas was born to a French father, Eugene Pierre Jolas, and a German mother Christine, née Ambach, in the USA, where his parents had emigrated a few years earlier. In 1897, before Eugene's third birthday, his parents returned to Europe. He grew up in Forbach (Moselle) , after 1871 Alsace-Lorraine , today Lorraine . When he was 15, he traveled to New York , where he perfected his English at DeWitt Clinton Evening High School in the Bronx and earned a modest living as a messenger. He wrote his first poems in German in an expressionist manner. He worked as a journalist for Volksblatt and Freiheitsfreund and The Pittsburgh Sun in Pennsylvania .

During the First World War Jolas joined the US Army in 1917 , he was stationed in Camp Lee, Virginia , where he published small newspapers for soldiers and veterans. After his discharge from the army, Jolas commuted between North America and Europe for several years to pursue his career in journalism. After staying in Paris in 1923 and 1924, he got a job with the newspaper The Chicago Tribune Paris Edition , for which he was a local reporter and met many artists and writers. His column was called Rambles through Literary Paris .

In 1924 Eugene Jolas' first volume of poems Ink was published by Rhythm Press in New York, the second, Cinema , by Adelphi Press, followed there in 1926; further volumes of poetry appeared in the 1930s. In January 1926 he returned to New York and married Maria MacDonald (1893–1987), whom he had met in Paris. After the marriage, the couple lived in New Orleans , where Jolas worked for The Item Tribune .

In 1927 Jolas and his wife returned to Paris and in April founded the avant-garde literary magazine transition with Elliot Paul . He met James Joyce and was very committed to Joyce's Work in Progress , later Finnegans Wake , a work that Jolas saw as the perfect complement to his own manifesto , which he published in transition in 1927 . The manifesto states, among other things, that "the revolution in the English language is a fait accompli" and that "time is a tyranny that must be abolished" and "the writer expresses that he does not communicate". We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths .

In February 1935, former friends in transition replied to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . Under the title The Testimony against Gertrude Stein , Georges Braque , Henri Matisse , André Salmon , Tristan Tzara and the Jolas accused her of untrue representation.

Jolas began working as a translator in the 1930s. He took a break from his publishing activities in Paris and worked in New York for the Havas News Agency, where he translated American "news" into French. In the literary field, he created the English version of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and worked on the work of André Breton , Gérard de Nerval and Carl Sternheim . In 1937 he returned to Paris, where he continued to translate and publish anthologies . In 1938 Jolas was the co-founder of the new monthly literary magazine Volontes . Raymond Queneau was one of the other founders . Volontes was stopped at the outbreak of World War II , transition in the spring of 1938. In 1939 Jolas moved back to New York and became a freelance writer. After the German occupation of France in 1940, he brought his family back to America.

After working for the Office of War Information in New York, he went to London in 1944 to translate messages. In January 1945 he helped build a free press in Germany that was not based on ideology . He worked for a newspaper in Aachen and Heidelberg and then became "Editor-in-Chief" at the German news agency (DANA, later DENA). In February 1947 he returned to his family in Paris and worked on his autobiography Man From Babel , which he had begun in 1939. In 1948 he became editor of the Neue Zeitung in Munich , he gave up this post in April 1950 and returned to Paris to be a freelance writer again. Eugene Jolas died on May 26, 1952 after a long illness. The estate, listed as Eugene and Maria Jolas Papers , belongs to the holdings of the Kniecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut .

His daughter Betsy Jolas (* 1926) is a composer.

Jolas often used the name Theo Rutra as a pseudonym .

More information

Works (selection)

  • Cinema: poems . Introduction: Sherwood Anderson . Adelphi, New York 1926
  • Eugene Jolas (Ed.): Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie américaine . Kra, Paris 1928.
  • Eugene Jolas (Ed.): Le Nègre qui chante . Editions des Cahiers libres, Paris 1928
  • Secession in Astropolis . Black Sun Press, Paris 1929.
  • Samuel Beckett , Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, William Carlos Williams , among others: In: Our Exmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). Essays on James Joyce 's Finnegans Wake .
  • Hypnologist of the Schelten's Eye . Editions Vertigral, Paris 1932
  • The Language of Night . The Servire Press, The Hague 1932
  • Motsdéluge, hypnologues . Editions des Cahiers libre, Paris 1933
  • I Have Seen Monsters and Angels . Transition Press, Paris 1938
  • Planets and Angels . Cornell College chapbooks, Mount Vernon, Iowa 1940.
  • Words from the Deluge . Available from Gotham Book Mart, New York 1941.
  • Wandering Poem: Angelic Mythamorphosis of the City of London . Transition Press, Paris 1946.
  • Chemins du monde : I. Fin de l'ère coloniale? II. Peuples et evolution . Editions de Clermont, Paris 1948.
Posthumously
  • Andreas Kramer, Rainer Rumold (eds.), Eugene Jolas: Man from Babel . Yale University Press, New Haven 1998. Autobiography.
  • Klaus H. Kiefer, Rainer Rumold (eds.): Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924–1951 . Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 2009.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank Krause: France and Expressionism , p. 141
  2. ↑ Guide to the Eugène and Maria Jolas Papers . Yale University Library. Retrieved June 16, 2018.
  3. ↑ Manifesto ( Memento of May 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Georges Braque et al: Testimony Against Gertrude Stein . (PDF; 2.9 MB) transition , accessed on February 28, 2010 .
personal data
SURNAME Jolas, Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Theo Rutra
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Union City
DATE OF DEATH May 26, 1952
Place of death Paris