Paul Éluard

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Paul Éluard, 1945Signature Paul Eluard.svg

Paul Éluard (actually Eugène-Émile-Paul Grindel ; born December 14, 1895 in Saint-Denis near Paris , † November 18, 1952 in Charenton-le-Pont near Paris) was a French lyric poet and one of the most famous poets of surrealism .

Life

Paul Éluard, around 1911

Éluard was born in a suburb of Paris, the only son of real estate agent Clément Grindel and the tailor Jeanne-Marie Grindel (née cousin). He grew up in an orderly middle-class situation and after the state elementary school he attended high school, which he graduated as a mediocre student at the age of 16. From childhood, Éluard was sickly and was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1912 . During a spa stay in the Swiss mountains, he met his future wife Gala , whom he married in 1917 and to whom many of his poems refer.

From 1913 on, Éluard published his first poems while still in the sanatorium in Davos . His family supported him financially. After his recovery, Éluard was drafted into the army in 1914. However , he spent most of the war sick behind the front in the hospital. In August 1916 he chose the name Éluard as a pseudonym. It was his maternal grandmother's maiden name. Through Jean Paulhan , he joined the artists around André Breton in 1919 . He published other poems and worked for magazines such as Proverbe and Littérature . However, he made his living as a broker in his father's business until his father's death. His legacy enabled him to work as a freelance writer from then on.

Paul Éluard (right) and Théodore Fraenkel , Paris 1920

In 1921 Éluard visited together with his wife Gala Max Ernst in Cologne , with whom he also worked in the following years. He bought the painting Celebes from Ernst that same year and Oedipus Rex the following year . In 1924, Breton published the Surrealism Manifesto in Paris , which replaced Dadaism . Éluard took this change of direction into his poetry and wrote his most important works by 1928.

Paul Éluards house in Eaubonne , where he lived from 1923

1927 joined Éluard with Louis Aragon , André Breton , Benjamin Péret and Pierre Unik the French Communist Party in, but he was already excluded from the 1933 re. Two years later he met the painter Salvador Dalí ; Because of him, his wife Gala divorced him in 1932. But he wrote her love letters until the end of his life. In 1930 he met Maria Benz, known as “ Nusch ”, an actress of German descent whom he married in 1934.

In 1936 he was involved in organizing the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London , and two years later, in 1938, he was instrumental in organizing the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme , which took place at the Beaux-Arts gallery in Paris. In the same year, the politically motivated differences between Breton and Éluard, who had come closer to Stalinism , caused the separation from the surrealist group; Max Ernst and Man Ray joined him in solidarity.

Grave of Paul Éluard

Éluard spent the Second World War in Paris with his daughter Cécile, who was born in 1918 from his marriage to Gala. After the invasion of the Wehrmacht , he went underground and was involved in the Resistance . In 1942 he rejoined the PCF and became something of a socialist poet star . Thousands of copies of his poem Liberté were dropped from English planes over occupied France .

His wife Nusch died of a stroke in 1946. Éluard married Dominique Lemort in 1951, whom he had met in Mexico in 1949 and to whom he dedicated the poetry collection Le Phénix .

In November 1952, Éluard died of a heart attack and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

On April 2, 2007 the asteroid (15752) Eluard was named after him.

Act

Badge in Charenton-le-Pont

Breton attested to Éluard, the “friend of painters”, that all surrealist poets were very close to painting. Some close friendships existed with later important painters such as Max Ernst , Pablo Picasso , Man Ray , Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí .

In 1937, Éluard described Surrealism as an “état d'esprit” and an instrument of knowledge, as an outrage against the “société actuelle” - against a society that humiliates the individual and is psychologically and socially repressive; but the writers and intellectuals who know each other in the wake of de Sade , Lautréamont , Freud , Picasso , Rimbaud , and in the wake of technical progress and the labor movement will contribute to the downfall of the "good and beautiful" of the bourgeoisie. According to Éluard, writers are the conscience of society.

In the foreword to the Resistance anthology (vol. 1) L'Honneur des poètes , Éluard takes up topics from the poetry discussion. He added the poets of the Resistance to the ranks of poets who, like Victor Hugo , Arthur Rimbaud and Mayakovsky, turned to action. Poets should seek the connection to the real world, they are people like others. The power of poetry, because the poets have power over words, now has a precise meaning: to shout, to accuse and to express hope.

The English writer Aldous Huxley described Éluard, however, as "A man without talent".

Works (in German)

  • Poems . Transferred by Stephan Hermlin . Oberbadischer Verlag, Singen n.d. (1947?)
  • Political poems . With a foreword by Louis Aragon . German by Stephan Hermlin. People and the world, Berlin 1949
  • From the horizon of one person to the horizon of all people . Selected and translated by Friedrich Hagen . Drawings by Max Schwimmer . Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1956
  • Capital of pain - Capitale de la douleur . German by Gerd Henninger . Henssel, Berlin 1959; New edition ibid. 1983, ISBN 3-87329-520-2
  • Choix de Poèmes - Selected poems . Introduction by Louis Parrot . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963
  • Unforgettable body . With 12 photos by Lucien Clergue and book cover by Pablo Picasso. Hieronimi, Bonn 1963
  • Mourning beautiful face . Selection, rewrite and commentary by Stephan Hermlin. People and World, Berlin 1968
  • Paramyths . With 11 collages by Max Ernst . Der Spiegel Gallery, Cologne 1970
  • The misfortunes of the immortals . With 21 collages by Max Ernst. Gallery Der Spiegel, Cologne 1971
  • Répétitions (with Max Ernst). Gallery Der Spiegel, Cologne 1971
  • The inside of the view. 8 visible songs . German by Alexander Koval . Gallery Der Spiegel, Cologne 1972
  • Sisters of hope . Selected poems. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-423-05419-0
  • The Immaculate Conception - L'immaculée conception . Rogner & Bernhard, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-8077-0006-4
  • The victory of Guernica - La Victoire de Guernica . With 17 linocuts by Jörg Scherkamp . Galerie-Verlag, Schwiftingen 1979
  • Love letters to Gala (1924–1948) . Foreword by Jean-Claude Carrière . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1987; Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-423-11166-6
  • Le visage de la paix - The face of peace (with Pablo Picasso). Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-458-19102-X (= Insel-Bücherei 1102)
  • 152 Proverbs updated (with Benjamin Péret ). Anabas, Giessen 1995, ISBN 3-87038-272-4

literature

  • Jean-Charles Gateau: Paul Éluard or The Seeing Brother. Biography without a mask . Edition q, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-86124-195-1 .

Web links

Commons : Paul Éluard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Eluard , eluard.org, accessed October 17, 2019
  2. ↑ Schneede, Uwe M .: The Art of Surrealism - Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Photography, Film , p. 230.
  3. ^ Dictionnaire universel des noms propres. 2nd Edition. Petit Robert, Paris 1977, p. 880 f.
  4. ↑ Jörg Drews (Ed.): Poets abuse poets. The ultimate collection of all colleague scolds. Reclam, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-379-01506-7 , p. 39.
personal data
SURNAME Éluard, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grindel, Eugène
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French surrealism poet
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis)
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1952
Place of death Charenton-le-Pont