Léon-Paul Fargue

Léon-Paul Fargue (born March 4, 1876 in Paris , † November 24, 1947 there ) was a French poet .

Life

Leon-Paul Fargue was born the illegitimate son of Louis-Jérôme Fargue and a seamstress. It was only very late that his birth father recognized him as his own son. This circumstance possibly contributed to his later melancholy and his excessive sensitivity.

However, his academic achievements were brilliant, at times he had the famous French poet Stéphane Mallarmé as a teacher. Then, at the same time as Alfred Jarry , he entered the famous Lycée Henri IV in order to prepare for his studies there. However, he did not meet the high expectations of his family: he tended to idleness and was more interested in piano playing, painting and, above all, poetry.

Soon he frequented literary circles, worth mentioning are the “mardis” (“Tuesdays”), regular meetings of poets in the house of his former teacher Stéphane Mallarmé . There he met the intellectual and cultural elite of France at the turn of the century: Valéry , Schwob , Claudel , but also Debussy and Gide .

Together with Valéry Larbaud and Paul Valéry , he founded Commerce (1924–1932). From then on, he decided to become a writer.

After a few smaller poems that he published in 1894, his first major work, Tancrède , appeared in 1895 . In 1912 the poetry collection Poèmes followed , in 1914 he published Pour la Musique (to music).

Towards the end of his life, from 1943, he suffered from paralysis on one side. In 1947, he died in Paris boroughs Montparnasse in the house of his wife, the painter Chériane . He had written until the very end.

Language and topics

Fargue writes his poems mostly free of meter, often he also writes in prose. His language is full of gentleness and sadness, his subjects always seem simple, often everyday ( Robert Doisneau once compared him to a photographer). Sometimes, as in Vulturne from 1928, his language also has a dreamy effect.

His love for his hometown Paris is evident in his work D'après Paris in 1932 and in Le Piéton de Paris ( The Parisian Pedestrian ) in 1939 . But he also tells of the oppressive loneliness of the night and of alcohol. He was also an excellent chronicler of Paris society.

Quote

You are cleaning up the universe with the tools of reason. Well. So you get a nice and tidy mess.

Works (selection)

• Poèmes , 1905
• Nocturnes , 1905
• Tancrède , 1911
• Pour la musique , 1912
• Banality , 1928
• Vulturne , 1928
• Épaisseurs , 1929
• Sous la lampe , 1929
• Ludions , 1930
• D'après Paris 1932
• Le Piéton de Paris 1939
• Velasquez 1946

Web links

• Literature by and about Léon-Paul Fargue in the catalog of the German National Library