Gabriel de Guilleragues

Gabriel de Guilleragues (born November 18, 1628 in Bordeaux , † March 15, 1685 in Constantinople ) was a French diplomat and writer.

life and work

Guilleragues studied at the Collège de Navarre . From 1651 until his death in 1666 he was in the service of Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti . Then he went to Paris as a courtier and was secretary to the Duc de Foix (Henri François de Foix de Candale Duc de Randan, 1640-1714), and from 1669 to the king. He was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople and resided there from 1679 until his death. The sofa affair he successfully survived is famous, in which he refused for years to sit on a stool instead of, like the vizier, on a sofa when presented to the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pascha (like his predecessor Charles Olier de Nointel) (which he finally enforced in 1684).

Gilleragues wrote ud T. Les lettres portugaises (1669) the first epistolary novel in French literature, but was not identified as an author until the 20th century, as he posed as the translator of a text by the Portuguese nun Soror Mariana Alcoforado . Guillerague's contemporaries thought the letters were genuine. Their entirely literary character was not recognized for a long time, so that neither the text nor its author appeared in literary histories.

The five Portuguese letters, the success of which was exceptional in the large number of editions and translations (also by Rainer Maria Rilke , 1913), are the "first-person novel of a passion that is aware of its sinfulness and recognizes its hopelessness" (Beau). With a simple style, the author creates the impression of complete truth and authenticity. The proof of the fictionality of the letters was provided by Frederick Charles Green , Leo Spitzer , Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot .

The orientalist Antoine Galland preceded his translation of the fairy tales of 1001 nights with a dedication to the daughter of Guilleragues, in which he regretted not being able to dedicate the work to her (deceased) father, whom he regards not only as his benefactor, but as the genius with the greatest ability to enjoy the beautiful and to impart this ability to others ( le génie le plus capable de goûter et de faire estimer aux autres les belles choses ).

Works

• Lettres portugaises, Valentins et autres oeuvres de Guilleragues , ed. by Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot, Paris, Garnier, 1962.
• Chansons et bons mots. Valentine's. Lettres portugaises , ed. by Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot, Geneva, Droz, 1972.
• Correspondance , ed. by Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot, Geneva, Droz, 1976.
• Portuguese letters = Lettres portugaises , ed. by Charlotte Frei, Essen, The Blue Owl, 2002.

literature

• Frederick Charles Green , «Who was the author of the Lettres portugaises? », In: Modern Language Review 21, 1926, pp. 159-167.
• Leo Spitzer , "Les Lettres portugaises", in: Romanische Forschungen 65, 1953, pp. 94–135.
• Jean-Pierre and Thérèse Lassalle, Un Manuscrit des "Lettres d'une religieuse portugaise". Leçons, interrogations, hypothèses , Seattle / Paris / Tübingen, Papers on French seventeenth century literature, 1982 (preface by Wolfgang Leiner ).
• Lettres portugaises suivies de Guilleragues par lui-même , ed. by Frédéric Deloffre, Paris, Gallimard, 1990.
• Gisinda Eggers, Portuguese letters. Lettres d'amour d'une religieuse portugaise and its German translations from 1751 to 1945 , Berlin, University Library of the Free University of Berlin, 1994 (exhibition guide).
• Vittorio Fortunati, Guilleragues autore epistolare. Le "Lettres portugaises" e la "Correspondance" , Como, New Press, 1999.
• Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Well . Formation of a national myth , London 2000 (Portuguese, Lisbon 2006)
• Charlotte Frei, translation as fiction. The reception of the 'Lettres Portugaises' by Rainer Maria Rilke , Bern, Peter Lang, 2004.

Manual literature

• Albin Eduard Beau, «Anonymous, Lettres Portugaises», in: Major works of French literature. Individual presentations and interpretations , ed. by Irene Schwendemann, Munich, Kindler, 1976, pp. 176-177.
• Robert Horville, Le XVIIe Siècle. Les ambiguïtés du baroque et du classicisme, in: Histoire de la littérature française , ed. by Henri Mitterand, Paris 1988, pp. 235–407 (here: p. 344).
• Fanny Népote-Desmarres, "Guilleragues", in: Laffont-Bompiani. Le nouveau dictionnaire des auteurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays , Paris 1994, p. 1345 (Bouquins series).
• Bernard Raffalli (1941–2002), "Guilleragues, comte de", in: Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française , ed. by Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty and Alain Rey, Paris, Larousse, 2001, pp. 798–799.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gabriel de Guilleragues in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)