Georges Schehadé

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Georges Schehadé, Paris 1987

Georges Schehadé (born November 2, 1905 in Alexandria , † January 17, 1989 in Paris ) was a Lebanese poet and playwright. His dreamlike and fairytale-like, often alogical texts brought him close to surrealism . He wrote his work in French, but three of his six full-length pieces were premiered on German-speaking stages.

life and work

Schehadé, the second of six children of an Orthodox Christian family from Lebanon, grew up in a wealthy family in Alexandria before the family moved to Beirut after their father lost money . He studied law and from 1930 worked for the French mandate administration , in 1945 he became general secretary of the École Supérieure des Lettres in Beirut, which had been founded the year before .

At that time he had already attracted a lot of attention in his homeland with his poetry. Initially oriented primarily to the language of Verlaine and Rimbaud , over the years he developed an increasingly reduced, more concentrated imagery. One critic wrote that Schehadé differs "in his total submission to the unconscious and a conscious artistic intransigence ... He does not make his poems, but watches over their birth." Through the sponsorship of Saint-John Perses , who first wrote Schehadé's poems in 1931 published his magazine Commerce , he also became known to a French audience. On his first trip to Europe in 1933, he met Perse, Max Jacob and Jules Supervielle personally. From 1946 he stayed in Paris more often, in 1948 he met André Breton and from then on he regularly took part in meetings of the Surrealists .

In 1951, Schehadé's play Monsieur Bob'le , written before the war, premiered at the Théâtre de la Huchette and met with very divided reactions from the critics with his surreal series of images. In the weeks following the premiere, the press carried out what was later referred to as the bataille de Monsieur Bobl'le (the battle for Monsieur Bob'le). Opponents and supporters fought violent verbal battles. Finally, in Le Figaro Littéraire , André Breton gave the starting signal for a series of very positive reviews of the piece. This was followed by contributions from René Char , Georges Limbour , Benjamin Péret , Gérard Philipe and Henri Pichette .

His next two plays, La Soirée des proverbes ( Proverbs , 1954) and Histoire de Vasco ( The Story of Vasco ), were directed by Jean-Louis Barrault . The latter was premiered in 1956 with great success at the Schauspielhaus Zurich . The play tells the story of a barber who involuntarily gets caught up in atrocities of war and has been criticized for his anti-militarism. Histoire de Vasco was also the subject of the opera The Story of Vasco by British composer Gordon Crosse (libretto: Ted Hughes ), which had its world premiere in Great Britain in 1974 at the London Coliseum .

Finally, in 1961, Barrault premiered Le Voyage ( The Journey ) in Paris.

In 1958 the film Goha , for which Schehadé wrote the screenplay, received an award in Cannes ( Prix ​​Le Premier Regard ). The violets had its world premiere in 1960 at the Schauspielhaus Bochum : a play about a scientist who fission with violets and thus triggers the end of the world. In 1965 the premiere of The Emigrant ( L'Émigré de Brisbane ) took place at the Residenztheater (Munich) , in which the legacy that a rich man forgotten from his hometown bequeaths to the illegitimate child he claims to have fathered there causes confusion. The piece was added to the Comédie-Française repertoire in 1967 .

Three of his six full-length pieces were broadcast as television films in Germany in the 1960s , such as Die Reise (1965) ( ZDF ) and others. a. with Horst Tappert , The Emigrant (1967) ( Bayerischer Rundfunk ) a. a. with Lukas Ammann and The Story of Vasco (1968) (ZDF) a. a. with Heidelinde Weis .

In 1951 Schehadé married Alice-Marie Collerais (1918–1998) from France and had a son, Elie-Philippe (* 1951). In 1977 he finally settled in Paris because of the war in Lebanon, where he was the first to be awarded the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 1986 . His grave is on the Cimetière Montparnasse .

Both his last poems and the complete edition of his works were published in Beirut in 1998 ( Éditions Dar An-Nahar ).

Works

Poems

  • Étincelles , Edition de la Pensée latine, Paris 1928
  • Poésies I , GLM, Paris 1938
  • Poésies II , GLM, Paris 1948
  • Poésies III , GLM, Paris 1949
  • Poésies Zéro ou L'Écolier Sultan (written 1928/29), GLM, Paris 1950
  • Si tu rencontres un ramier (later Poésies IV ), GLM, Paris 1951
  • Les Poésies (Poésie I – IV), Gallimard , Paris 1951
  • Poésies V (1972)
  • Le Nageur d'un seul amour (= Poésies VI ), Gallimard, Paris 1985
  • Poésies VII (last poems), Editions Dar An-Nahar, Beyrouth 1998

Dramas

  • Monsieur Bob'le , Gallimard, Paris 1951
  • La Soirée des proverbes , Gallimard, Paris 1954
  • Histoire de Vasco , Gallimard, Paris 1956
  • Les Violettes , Gallimard, Paris 1960
  • Le Voyage , Gallimard, Paris 1961
  • L'Émigré de Brisbane , Gallimard, Paris 1965
  • L'Habit fait le prince (written 1957), pantomime, Gallimard, Paris 1973

Others

  • Rodogune senses ("Roman", published Beirut 1942, Paris 1947; written 1929)
  • Goha (screenplay for the film of the same name), 1958

German editions

  • The story of Vasco. A piece in six pictures , in German by Herbert Meier , S. Fischer Verlag , Frankfurt 1958
  • Proverbs evening , German by Hanns von Winter, in: Joachim Schondorff (Hrsg.) French theater of the avant-garde. Audiberti, Tardieu, Schehadé, Adamov, Genet, Ionesco, Vian, Arrabal , Langen Müller Verlag , Munich 1961, pp. 115–193
  • Die Veilchen , German by Karl Günter Simon , in: Theater im S. Fischer Verlag I, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1962
  • Poetry I – VII , French - German, transl. Jürgen Brôcan , Verlag Hans Schiler , Berlin 2006
  • German excerpts in: French literature of the Levant. Akzente (magazine) H. 4, August 1997, pp. 314-319

literature

  • Danielle Baglione, Albert Dichy: Georges Schehadé. Poète des deux rives. 1905-1989 . Editions de l'IMEC, Paris; Editions Dar An-Nahar 1999
  • Through the flower . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1960 ( online - report on the world premiere of Die Veilchen ).
  • Saint-John Perse : Georges Schéhadé, in Verena von der Heyden-Rynsch Ed .: Vive la littérature! Contemporary French literature. Hanser, Munich 1989, pp. 174f.

Web links

Proof of quotation

  1. ^ The critic André Simon at a lecture on April 30, 1937 in Beirut, quoted in Danielle Baglione, Albert Dichy: Georges Schehadé. Poète des deux rives. 1905-1989 , Paris: Éditions de l'IMEC, Éditions Dar An-Nahar 1999, p. 83
  2. ↑ The Journey of Georges Schehadé as a television film by ZDF
  3. ↑ The Emigrant by Georges Schehadé as a television film for Bayerischer Rundfunk
  4. ↑ The story of Vasco by Georges Schehadé as a TV film by ZDF
personal data
SURNAME Schehadé, Georges
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lebanese poet and playwright
DATE OF BIRTH November 2, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Alexandria
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1989
Place of death Paris