Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (born March 4, 1901 in Ambatofotsy , † June 22, 1937 in Antananarivo ) was a Malagasy writer and translator.

His work has not yet been translated into German.

life and work

Rabearivelo was born out of wedlock. Like his mother, Rabearivelo belonged to the Merina nobility , which derives its origin from King Ralambo (1575–1610). He attended the school of the Frères des Écoles chrétiennes in Andohalo (Antananarivo) and the Jesuit high school Saint-Michel in Amparibe, which he had to leave at the age of 13 due to indiscipline. From then on he continued his autodidactic training, read books and published verses in the magazine Vakio ity as early as 1915 under the pseudonym K. Verbal.

The various activities he carried out as a teenager gave him plenty of time to read and gave him access to books and magazines. He was secretary and interpreter at the district administration in Ambatolampy, draftsman of lace designs for Anna Gouverneur, to whom he dedicated poems; then he looked after the library of the Cercle de l'Union , wrote chronicles for the bilingual journal Journal de Madagascar under the pseudonym Amance Valmond, first in Malagasy, then also in French. He dedicated the verse drama Le prince s'amuse , published in 1921, to the poet Pierre Camo , who was then a colonial official in Tananarive. In 1926 he married Marguerite Razafitrimo, called Mary, whose family had a photo studio in Tananarive. At that time he was working as a proofreader in the Imprimerie de l'Imerina , a printing company that also printed poems by him. With his wife, Mary, he had a son and four daughters, one of whom died at the age of two. Rabearivelo translated French poets ( Valéry , Verlaine , Rimbaud and especially Baudelaire ) as well as Rilke , Poe , Tagore , Whitman and others. a. into Malagasy. He also wrote for European magazines (including Anthropos in Vienna). In Tananarive, folk operas for which he had written the lyrics were performed: 1935 Aux portes de la ville and 1936 Imaitsoanala, fille d'oiseau .

Despite his literary success and numerous correspondence with literary greats of his time, Rabearivelo felt like an outsider: the Malagasy people did not understand his work and for the French colonial rulers he was a “native” whose familiarity with the French language and culture they viewed with suspicion. An invitation to the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 was withdrawn. Deeply disappointed, sick and penniless, the poet took his own life. He poisoned himself with cyanide .

He kept a diary right up to the end of which handwritten pages in French, beginning in January 1933, have been preserved in 1833. This text, which documents his tremendous reading experience and the connection with the literature of his time, was published in 2010 in the first volume of the collected works.

Works

• La Coupe de Cendres , 1924,
• Sylves , 1927,
• Volumes , 1928,
• Presque songes. Sari-nofy. Ed. bilingual français-malgache. [1934]. Sepia ed. 2006. ISBN 2-84280-119-9
• Traduit de la Nuit . Ed. bilingual français-malgache. [1935]. 2007. ISBN 978-2-84280-125-0
• Chants pour Abeone , 1937,
• Vieilles chansons of the pays d'Imerina . Procedees d'une biography du poete malgache par Robert Boudry. 1939.
• L'Interférence , 1989,
• Œuvres complètes . Part 1. 2010., Part 2. 2012

literature

• Almut Seiler-Dietrich : The diaries of the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo . Politics and poetry. Mainz 2010. pdf
• Almut Seiler-Dietrich: Think of us in our quiet grottos. The diaries of the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo . Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005

Individual evidence

1. ↑ MK Tshitenge Lubabu: Madagascar: 22 June 1937, le poète Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo décrit son suicide. In: Jeune Afrique . June 29, 2012, accessed December 2, 2018 (French). 

Web links

Commons : Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo in the catalog of the German National Library