Gérard de Nerval

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Gérard de Nerval (around 1854) Signature Gérard de Nerval.JPG

Gérard de Nerval (actually Gérard Labrunie ; born May 22, 1808 in Paris , † January 26, 1855 ibid) was a French writer . During his lifetime he was considered a marginal representative of romanticism . However, his texts seem fresher today than those of many more renowned colleagues of his time. His prose text Aurélia fascinated later authors like Baudelaire , Proust and the Surrealists .

Life and work

Youth and literary beginnings

Gérard de Nerval (as he called himself from 1831) was the only child of a doctor who was appointed medical officer shortly after the birth of his son and was transferred to the French Army of the Rhine in Germany. Since the young mother wanted to accompany her husband to his place of work, she gave Gérard to a wet nurse in her native Valois , but died in distant Silesia in 1810 . After her death, Nerval came to live with one of her mother's uncle, also in Valois. He stayed there until his father, who had finally returned home, brought him to Paris in 1814 after the end of the Napoleonic campaigns. Here he attended the Lycée Charlemagne , where he had the later author Théophile Gautier as a classmate.

After he had already started to poetry in 1821 at the age of 13, his first texts were printed in 1826, namely political-oppositional poems in the Napoleon trend - nostalgia of those years as well as a satirical sketch about the "undetectable", i. H. Members of the Académie française often absent from meetings . At the same time he wrote a transmission of Goethe's Faust I , which gained him great recognition when it was published in 1827, and which was set to music by Hector Berlioz in 1829.

The years as an author

In 1828 he was introduced to Victor Hugo and processed his novel Han d'Islande into a play, which was only premiered after the July Revolution in 1831. On February 25, 1830 he was present with the entire circle of friends of Hugo at the premiere of his programmatically romantic drama Hernani , the legendary theater scandal Bataille d'Hernani , a "battle" of applause and boos. In the same year he published a highly acclaimed anthology of self-transcribed German poems including an introductory "Study on German Poets". With this he made numerous German poets known to his compatriots and became an important mediator of German-language literature in France.

Although Nerval was now quite successful as a man of letters, he began to study medicine in 1832 at the urging of his father. However, when he inherited 30,000 francs from a grandfather in 1834 (on which a frugal person could have lived for 20 years), he broke off the listlessly pursued studies and joined the “ bohème ” around Théophile Gautier, the literary and artist milieu on the edge of the Parisian civil society. He also made his first long trip to southern France and Italy.

In the same year he fell in love with the actress Jenny Colon, who did not listen to him, but had a strong influence until 1838. So he founded an elaborately made theater magazine for her in 1835. When it went bankrupt a year later, Nerval was ruined and had to live from his pen. He succeeded in doing this as a co-author of plays, e. B. 1837 and 1839 as a partner of the bustling Alexandre Dumas and as a journalist, z. B. with literary reviews and travelogues.

In 1837 he went on a trip to Belgium with Gautier. In 1838 he made his first trip to Germany to Frankfurt, and in 1839/40 a second to Vienna. In 1840 he published a transcription of the entire Faust (I and II) as well as other German poems.

Illness and end

In 1841 he had delusions for the first time and spent most of the year in clinics. In 1842 he tried to get back on his feet with journalistic work and prepared a trip to the Orient that was to bring him new inspiration. In fact, he was on the road all of 1843: Malta , Cairo , Beirut , Rhodes , Smyrna . Reports about this trip appeared in magazines from 1844; He later processed them into the book Scènes orientales I: Les Femmes du Caire , which, however, went almost unnoticed when it was published in the revolutionary year of 1848 .

From 1844 to 1847 Nerval was also on the road a lot (Belgium, Holland, London, and the Paris region) and wrote travel reports and impressions. At the same time he wrote short stories and poetry and translated poems by Heinrich Heine , who lived in Paris and with whom he was friends (printed in 1848).

Because his health deteriorated drastically from 1850 and he spent more and more time in clinics, he worked obsessively in the following years whenever he could. In 1851 he published the final version of his trip to the Orient under the title Voyage en Orient and in December performed his play L'Imagier de Haarlem , which was supposed to be his Faust but failed.

Nerval's grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris

He then looked for older and more recent texts that had already been published in magazines, revised them and combined them into two anthologies, which are now considered his masterpieces: Les Illuminés ou Les Précurseurs du socialisme (1852) and Les Filles du feu (1854). The first volume contains six fictional portraits of historical males whose “socialism” is more anarchism ; the second comprises eight very different, mostly narrative texts about female protagonists and, as an appendix with the collective title Chimères, 12 artful hermetic sonnets , including the famous El Desdichado (= the unfortunate one), which seems like a conclusion to his existence .

Nerval's last work was the prose text Aurélia , probably begun in 1841 , which appears as a suggestive and perfectly formed balancing act between dream and reality and the last part of which was only published posthumously.

Nerval made his last trip to Germany again in 1854. He was particularly enthusiastic about Nuremberg, Bamberg, Leipzig and Dresden.

When he found himself at the end of after a new hospital stay without fixed abode and with only meager fees on the streets of Paris, he committed early in 1855 suicide . He hanged himself on the bars in front of a drainage channel in the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne (no longer in existence today) .

Prix ​​Gérard de Nerval

From 1989 to 2016, the French authors' association Société des gens de lettres (SGDL) , which has existed since 1838, and the Goethe Institute awarded the Prix ​​Gérard de Nerval every year . This was awarded to literary translators from German into French.

Works

  • Œuvres complètes . 6 vols., Paris 1867–1877
  • Œuvres complètes . Edited by A. Marie, J. Marsan, É. Champion, 6 vols., Paris 1926–1932
  • Oeuvres . Edited by H. Lemaître, 2 volumes, Classiques Garnier, Paris 1958
  • Voyage en Orient. 2 vols., Paris 1851
  • Voyage en Orient. Ed. M. Jeaumaret, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1984
  • Les Filles you feu . Paris 1854
  • Les Filles you feu . Ed. L. Cellier, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1972
  • The Daughters of the Flame , translated by Anjuta Aigner-Dünnwald and Friedhelm Kemp . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1991
  • Sylvie. Memories of the Valois . With the essay The Fog Between the Words by Umberto Eco , edited, translated and commented on by Burkhart Kroeber . Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung , Mainz 2016
  • La bohème galante . Paris 1855
  • Le Rêve et la Vie . Paris 1855
  • Aurélia, ou le Rêve et la Vie. Lettres d'amour. Edited by J. Richer et alii, Paris 1965
  • Poésies, suivies de Petits Châteaux de Bohème, Les Nuits d'octobre, Promenades et Souvenirs, La Pandora, Contes et Facéties. Edited by M. Hafez, Le Livre de Poche , Paris 1964.
  • Les Chimères . Edited by J. Guillaume, Brussels 1966.
  • Pandora . Edited by J. Guillaume, Namur 1968; 1976.
  • Les Illuminés, ou les Précurseurs du socialisme , Bibliothèque Marabout, Verviers 1973.
  • Les Chimères , Le Livre de Poche, Paris 1984.

literature

  • Album Nerval . Iconography choisie et commentée par Éric Buffetaud et Claude Pichois. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Editions Gallimard, 1993. ISBN 2070112829 . (Illustrated biography.)
  • Susanne Goumegou: Dream Text and Dream Discourse: Nerval, Breton, Leiris . Fink, Munich 2007.
  • Susanne Greilich: Imaginative and imaginary space. Der Orient Gérard de Nervals, in: Gesine Müller, Susanne Stemmler Ed .: Space, Movement, Passage. Postcolonial Francophone literatures. Gunter Narr, Tübingen 2009 ISSN  1861-3934 ISBN 9783823365150 pp. 33-49.
  • Rolf Günter Renner: Reasonable dream and delusional reason. To Gérard de Nerval's "Aurelia". In: Rein A. Zondergeld (Ed.): Phaïcon 4. Almanach der Fantastischen Literatur. Suhrkamp st 636, Frankfurt 1980.
  • Egon Huber: Gerard de Nerval's master novella 'Sylvie'. In: German-French Institute Ludwigsburg (ed.): Germany - France. Ludwigsburg Contributions to the Problem of Franco-German Relations , Vol. 2 (= Publications of the German-French Institute Ludwigsburg eV Volume 2), Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1957, pp. 180–188.

Web links

Commons : Gérard de Nerval  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gérard de Nerval at romantis.free.fr
  2. ^ Joseph Hanimann: France abolishes translator award . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of December 23, 2016, p. 14.
  3. ↑ Bilingual: Aurelia. French German. Translated by Hedwig Kubin; Afterword Walter Pabst . Series: Fischer Library of the Hundred Books , 42nd Frankfurt 1961. - Another edition only in German, translator Eva Rechel-Mertens , afterword Hans Straub. Manesse Verlag , Zurich 1960.
personal data
SURNAME Nerval, Gérard de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Labrunie, Gérard (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1808
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 1855
Place of death Paris