Poil de carotte

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Poil de carotte (German: carrot hair or carrot head ) is a novel by the French writer Jules Renard , published in 1894.

It was first published in German in 1946 as Rotfuchs. Story of a strange family and a difficult child with a title changed to Mother's Son and a new translation in 1987. The one-act play based on the novel was translated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal under the title Fuchs and was premiered in this form on February 16, 1901 in Vienna .

action

The childhood of the red-haired Poil de Carotte is touched on in 48 short, episodic sections . It is not an idyllic childhood of the fin de siècle bourgeoisie , in which security and love prevail, but a horrible coexistence in the Lepic family. The boy suffers extremely from the hatred of his own mother, who abuses him mentally and physically, the indifference of his father and the egoism of his siblings.

From this situation of repression, he compensates for the interplay between longing for love and aggression with lies, cruelty and resignation . In his distress, he ponders whether to commit suicide, but suppresses it because the only two friends he has, a cat and a dog, would not be sufficiently affected. It is only when he tries to commit suicide that his father realizes his anguish and makes a pact with him.

classification

Jules Renard tried linguistically precisely to depict the character of the child and its complex mental state. Renard's work is seen as exposing the repressive upbringing of children.

expenditure

  • Jules Renard: Red Fox. Story of a strange family and a difficult child . Translated from the French by Walter Widmer, illustrations by Heinrich Strub, Classen, Zurich 1946, 200 pp.
  • Jules Renard: Red Fox. Story of a strange family and a difficult child . Translated from the French by Walter Widmer , illustrations by Heinrich Strub , Hebel Verlag, Baden-Baden 1946 (licensed edition by Werner Classen Verlag, Zurich)
  • Jules Renard: Red Fox . Translated from French into German and provided with an afterword by Walter Widmer, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1964, 137 pp.
  • Jules Renard: mother's son . Newly translated by Heidrun Hemje-Oltmanns. With an afterword by Vincenzo Orlando , Manholt, Bremen 1987, 167 pages, ISBN 3-924903-60-3
  • Jules Renard: mother's son . Newly translated by Heidrun Hemje-Oltmanns. With an afterword by Vincenzo Orlando, dtv, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-423-02211-6

review

“The childhood image of this novel clearly bears anti-Rousseauistic traits in that it depicts the child as an innocent being or, in Victor Hugo's sense, as enfant en sucre (Renard). The author's dissecting gaze reveals not only the suffering inflicted on children, but also the predictability and cruelty of children towards the weaker (Poil de Carotte torments a cat, denounces a teacher, annoys a blind man). Due to the family circumstances, Poil de Carotte even learns to hide his true feelings and to use hypocrisy and deceit. His intellectual talent (writing poetry, developing his own philosophy ) is just as little recognized as his need for attention (...). Renard also called his work an autobiographical dream. "

filming

The material of the novel served a total of five times as the basis of a film adaptation. With the exception of the last TV series adaptation to date, a Canadian production, they were all French productions, with Julien Duvivier even filmed the material twice.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chronicle. Retrieved July 27, 2017 .
  2. ↑ http://paed-services.uzh.ch/user_downloads/336/013_GesamtSS07.pdf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / paed-services.uzh.ch  
  3. ↑ Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer: Classics of children's and youth literature: an international lexicon , Vol. II, Metzler 2004, pp. 911f. ISBN 978-3476020215