L'Après-midi d'un faune (Mallarmé)
L'Après-midi d'un faune (The afternoon of a faun) is a symbolist poem by Stéphane Mallarmé that he wrote between 1865 and 1867 and published in 1876. It is considered his best-known work and describes the sensual experience of a faun when he wakes up from an afternoon sleep and reminisces about what happened in the morning in an intoxicating monologue . With his poem Mallarmé took up the ancient myth of Pan and Syrinx , which has been depicted time and again in poetry and painting.
The poem has become the starting point for diverse and important artistic creation. Above all, it served as the inspiration for Claude Debussy's piece of music Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune from 1894 and, together with this, for Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet L'Après-midi d'un faune from 1912. All three works take a central position in their respective art genre and in the development of artistic modernism .
plant
L'Après-midi d'un faune counts 110 lines in Alexandrians , the meter prevailing in French literature at the time. The Alexandrian was used as a grand verse for dramas and epics, but also in poetry, where ancient subjects were taken up and the mythological figures of the fauns and satyrs or the god Pan appeared as symbols of youth and youthful desires and longings.
The poem's protagonist is a faun who wakes up from an afternoon nap and tells monologically what he experienced in the morning or perhaps just dreamed. He remembers spotting two nymphs while making a panpipe , and then chasing them. They escaped, but he grabbed two others and dragged them to a sunlit clearing. He's not sure what happened there, but they got away too. The Faun vacillates between repentance for what he has done and justification for his desire. In the evening the feeling of guilt breaks through again, combined with the fear of possibly having wronged the goddess Venus and being severely punished for it. Finally, the faun, who has meanwhile been heavy with wine, falls asleep again. He calls goodbye to the nymphs and returns to the morning dream.
Mallarmé did not aim at the narrative reproduction of a plot for which an Arcadian summer day forms the background. He was interested in the poetic capture of erotic desire and sexual desire. To depict this emotional situation , which oscillates between imagination and reality, he used an abundance of means, linguistic (ambiguities, word fields , sound painting ) and typesetting (line insertion as a pause, alternation between normal, italic and upper case ).
Emergence
L'Après-midi d'un faune was created as a break in the grueling work on the poem Hérodiade . Mallarmé had already approached the faun motif in 1859 with Loeda - Idylle antique and Pan . Before Mallarmé, André Chénier , Alfred de Musset , Victor Hugo and Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle ensured the continued interest in the subject with their own poems. Théodore de Banville may have had a direct influence on Mallarmé with Diane au bois (Diana in the Grove) of 1864.
Mallarmé chose the generic term eclogue as the subtitle of his poem , thus placing it in the bucolic tradition , which ranges from Theocrites to Virgil to the erotic shepherd poetry of the Rococo . The painting Pan and Syrinx by the Rococo painter François Boucher , which he was able to see during his stay in London in 1863, is said to have served as a direct inspiration for the new work. The picture is based on the story of Pan and Syrinx from Ovid's Metamorphoses . According to Paul Valéry , however, the author Théodore de Banville Mallarmé is said to have suggested that, for profit-making purposes, a play aimed at the taste of a wider audience should be written. In a first version he actually drafted a scenic poem in three parts: Monologue d'un Faune - Dialogue des Nymphes - Réveil du Faune (Monologue des Faun - Dialogue of the Nymphs - Awakening of the Faun). In June 1865 Mallarmé noted:
«Depuis dix jours je me suis mis à travailler. J'ai laissé ‹Hérodiade› pour les cruels hivers: cette œuvre solitaire m'avait stérilisé, et, dans l'intervalle je rime un intermède héroïque dont le héros est un faune. Ce poème renferme une très haute et belle idée, mais les vers sont difficiles à faire, car je fais absolument scénique, non possible au théâtre mais exigeant le théâtre. »
“I got to work ten days ago. The Herodiade I can save up for the cruel winter. This work of loneliness drained me and in the meantime I am rhyming with a heroic interlude whose hero is a faun. This poem contains a very ambitious and beautiful idea, but the verses are hard work, because I create completely scenic, even if not suitable for theater, but still require the stage. "
Mallarmé created three versions of his poem, the last, substantially revised and final around 1866/67, but none was performed. Publication attempts also failed. Le Parnasse contemporain , the most important magazine for publications by the circle of poets to which Mallarmé belonged, rejected L'Après-midi d'un faune in 1875. Mallarmé then succeeded in getting the slightly retouched poem to print in a collector's edition with illustrations by his friend Édouard Manet .
reception
The poem found some recognition in the Impressionist artistic circles, Mallarmé's very suggestive language demonstrated cross-genre qualities. Ten years after the first book illustrations, Manet took up the subject again. Claude Debussy's symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , which premiered in 1894, occupies the central position in the reception . Mallarmé was enthusiastic about the work:
«La merveille! Votre illustration de l'Après-Midi d'un Faune, qui ne présenterait de dissonance avec mon texte, sinon qu'aller plus loin, vraiment, dans la nostalgie et dans la lumière, avec finesse, avec malaise, avec richesse. »
"Wonderful! is your illustration of the Après-Midi d'un Faune , which shows no inconsistency with my text, except that it truly goes further in yearning and glow, with finesse, with cunning and with richness. "
Mallarmé's music and poem later served as the basis for L'Après-midi d'un faune , Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 ballet, which is also considered a milestone in modern art (in this case, that of dance). Paul Valéry ( Œuvres . Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, Paris 1957, I, 670) wrote about L'Après-midi d'un faune that it was “une sorte de fugue littéraire, où des thèmes s'entrecroisent avec un art prodigieux” ( "A kind of literary fugue in which the themes intersect in a surprisingly artistic way").
The Italian draftsman Bruno Bozzetto based his animated film Allegro non troppo from 1976, based on Walt Disney's Fantasia , on the three works , giving the story a humorous and melancholy touch and the faun - in contrast to the youthful image, the Mallarmé, Debussy and especially Nijinsky evoked - already aged.
literature
- Thomas Munro: "L'après-Midi d'un Faune" et les relations entre les arts . In: Revue d'Esthétique , V, 1952, pp. 226–243.
- Jean-Michel Nectoux: L'Après-midi d'un Faune - Mallarmé, Debussy, Nijinsky . In: Les Dossiers du Musée d'Orsay , N ° 29 (exhibition catalog), Paris 1989.
- Hendrik Lücke: Mallarmé - Debussy. A comparative study of art perception using the example of “L'Après-midi d'un Faune” . In: Studies in Musicology , Volume 4. Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-8300-1685-9 .
Web links
- Frank Mehring: Le Jeu: The game in Mallarmé's theory of poetry and Debussy's “Prélude à L'après Midi D'un Faune”
- L'après-midi d'un faune work history and interpretation (French)
- Peter Por: The origin of the fragment (Mallarmé: L'après-Midi d'un Faune) and the origin of the fragment from the spirit of the fragment (Hofmannsthal: The death of Tizian)
- Alan Edwards: A faun's afternoon work history and interpretation, original text and translation (English)