Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe
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Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe ( French grave [mal] for Edgar Poe ) is a sonnet by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé from 1876 for the American writer Edgar Allan Poe , who died in 1849, and his work Mallarmé partly translated.
History and content
prehistory
Poe died unexpectedly on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore under circumstances that are still unexplained . Two days later he was buried in the Westminster Presbyterian Church cemetery. His grave was not specially marked for a long time, nor was there a gravestone . For years there was repeated discussion about placing a gravestone for Poe, but it was not until October 1865, 16 years after his death, that John Basil, Jr., director of a grammar school in Baltimore and several others, succeeded in doing so through an appeal for donations Aim to enable. The tomb financed in this way was finally inaugurated on November 17, 1875 in a solemn ceremony.
Sara Sigourney Rice (1831-1909), a teacher from Baltimore, published the book Edgar Allan Poe in 1877 . A Memorial Volume to commemorate this event. Along with many other writers, she wrote to the important French Poe translator Stéphane Mallarmé and asked for a few lines for her book. Mallarmé replied profusely on April 4, 1876, promising a contribution - his sonnet.
The sonnet
Mallarmé's sonnet follows the French tradition of the tombeaux , a kind of musical obituary whose origins go back to the Baroque . At the end of the 19th century they experienced a renaissance in lyrical form, among others through Mallarmé himself. He also wrote two more tombeaux for his French colleague friends Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine . He also wrote similar obituaries for the writer Théophile Gautier , the composer Richard Wagner and the painter Puvis de Chavannes . Six slightly different versions of Mallarmé's Tombeau d'Edgar Poe are known today.
text
Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,
Le Poète suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange
Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur
Edgar Poe's grave
Only transformed into himself by eternity,
the poet
awakens with his bare sword the disturbed century, which did not hear death's song of victory
in this unrecognized voice strangely.
They, because the angel, who gave the common word a
purer meaning before time, revolted the brood of vipers, decried
the magic potion that infatuated them
as a black mixture of depravity.
Alas, those hostile to the ground and the cloud!
So carved out of it our minds no picture,
with which Poe's grave adorned itself gloriously, half lofty,
quiet block, lost from dark disaster:
that, Grenzstein, the granite for ever removed from
the insult of the flight of the crows, which buzzes in the future!
The original French text was incorrectly reproduced in Rice's book because neither she nor the typesetter could speak the language. Mallarmé complained about this in a ten-page letter to Rice. On October 9, 2018, an undated autograph of Mallarmé's sonnet was auctioned for € 110,000 at the Sotheby’s auction house in Paris.
Interpretations and transfers
Mallarmé belonged, as u. a. Charles Baudelaire, another influential French Poe translator to the so-called Symbolists of French literature of the 19th century, and paid homage to Poe, one of the pioneers of symbolism in France, in the form of this symbolist sonnet. That makes it difficult to interpret. One of the first to try it was the French writer Jules Lemaître in October 1888 , followed in the 20th century by others. a. Charles Chassé and Gardner Davies.
The American literary scholar Bernard Weinberg interpreted Mallarmé's words primarily as an expression of anger by the author over the blatant misjudgment of Poe and his work during his lifetime by some critics and the hostility shown to him by adversaries. Furthermore, Weinberg saw in the sonnet the juxtaposition of past, present and future in appreciation of Poe.
“The poem is an encomium to the transcendent artist whose grasp of beauty has transformed him into an angelic figure rising above the trials of mortal existence. The symbol of the angel as a deification of the artist was important to the symbolists, representing both artistic transcendence and immortality. Mallarmé reiterated the view of Poe put forward by Baudelaire: that he was a tortured genius doomed by that very isolated genius to special greatness. Poe's art was the product of suffering and sacrifice accomplished in the face of the world's ignorance and vulgarity. "
“The poem is an encomion to the transcendent artist whose understanding of beauty has transformed him into an angelic figure who rises above the trials of mortal existence. The symbol of the angel as a deification of the artist was important to the symbolists, as it represents both artistic transcendence and immortality . Mallarmé reaffirmed Baudelaire's view of Poe that he was a tortured genius who, in turn, was condemned to special greatness by this unique genius. Poe's art was the result of suffering and sacrifice in the face of an ignorant and vulgar world. "
Transcriptions into other languages come from the American literary scholar and Poe biographer Daniel Hoffman , his US colleague Richard Wilbur , the Swiss Romance scholar and translator Hans Staub, and Mallarmé himself, who translated his sonnet into English.
reception
In painting
Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe
Artist: Henri Matisse
Link to the photo
(Please note copyrights )
In 1932, the Swiss publisher Albert Skira asked his friend, French Fauvist Henri Matisse, for 29 illustrations for his book Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé , which appeared in October of the same year with a total edition of only 165 copies. Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe interprets one of Matisse's works .
In music
The following works have been published under the title Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe :
- 1964: The Turkish electro musicians Erdem Buri (1925–1993) and İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926–2012) brought out a 7-minute piece with this title on their LP Electronic Music , in which Mallarmé's text is recited.
- 1985: The American composer Dominick Argento created the 18-minute orchestral suite entitled Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe based on the opera The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, composed in 1975 together with his musician colleague Charles Nolte . In it, however, another text is used, that of Poe's poem Annabel Lee .
- 1991: The Dutch composer and conductor Huub Kerstens (1947–1999), a representative of new and atonal music , composed an 8-minute commissioned work in which the text is recited. The world premiere took place on April 25, 1998 in the Posthoornkerk in Amsterdam .
- 2014: The Mexican new wave band Casino Shanghai released the 5-minute piece of the title on their album L'Action Minimal (In Aeternam Vale Remix) , in which the text is also recited.
See also
literature
- Sara Sigourney Rice: Edgar Allan Poe. A memorial volume. Turnbull Brothers, Baltimore 1877 ( digitized ).
- Bernard Weinberg : A Suggested Reading of Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe. In: L'Esprit Créateur. Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1961 (Stéphane Mallarmé) , The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1961, pp. 117-124.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Information on the auction of the autograph on sothebys.com
- ^ Patrick F. Quinn: The French Face of Edgar Poe. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1957, p. 12.
- ^ Frank T. Zumbach : Edgar Allan Poe: A biography. Winkler, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-538-06800-3 , p. 680 ff.
- ^ William F. Gill: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. New York, Philadelphia, Boston 1877, p. 276.
- ^ Sara Sigourney Rice: Dedication of the Monument. Ceremonies of the Occasion. In: Edgar Allan Poe. A memorial volume.
- ↑ Biography of Miss Sara Sigourney Rice on eapoe.org.
- ^ William F. Gill: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. P. 267.
- ↑ Cover , image on the J. Paul Getty Museum website .
- ^ Letter from Stéphane Mallarmé to Sara Sigourney Rice dated April 4, 1876
- ↑ Les "Tombeaux" de Mallarmé (pdf in French)
- ^ Sara Sigourney Rice: Edgar Allan Poe. A memorial volume. P. 94. (corrected version)
- ↑ The grave of Edgar Poe on projekt-gutenberg.org, translation by Richard von Schaukal , no year.
- ^ Letter from Stéphane Mallarmé to Sara Sigourney Rice dated January 12, 1877
- ^ Patrick F. Quinn: The French Face of Edgar Poe. P. 62.
- ^ Bernard Weinberg: A Suggested Reading of Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe. In: L'Esprit Créateur. Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1961 (Stéphane Mallarmé) , The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1961, p. 117.
- ^ Bernard Weinberg: A Suggested Reading of Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe. Pp. 117-124.
- ↑ Poe's Tomb by Daniel Hoffman.
- ↑ The Tomb of Edgar Poe by Richard Wilbur.
- ↑ The tomb of Edgar Poe by Hans Staub.
- ↑ The Tomb of Edgar Poe by Stéphane Mallarmé.
- ↑ Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe by Henry Matisse on eapoe.org
- ↑ Information on Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe by Erdem Buri and İlhan Mimaroğlu.
- ^ Gregor Herzfeld : Poe in music. A versatile alliance. Habilitation thesis. Free University of Berlin 2012. Waxmann, Münster 2013, ISBN 978-3-8309-2923-9 , p. 96.
- ↑ Dominick Argento: Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe (1985) on boosey.com.
- ↑ Information on Huub Kerstens
- ↑ Information on Kersten's work Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe
- ↑ Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe from Casino Shanghai on soundcloud.com,