Die and become

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Die and become (French: Si le grain ne meurt ) is the name of the autobiography of the French writer and intellectual André Gide .

The 400-page work was first published in 1926, and in 1929 also in a German translation by Ferdinand Hardekopf by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt , Stuttgart.

The topic

Gide describes in Die and Will the time from his earliest childhood to his engagement to his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895. He reflects on the strict, puritanical upbringing of his Protestant mother, his failure at school, his cultural education, his admiration for Madeleine and finally the discovery of his homosexuality .

Gide deals with the time of his marriage to Madeleine in his also autobiographical work Et nunc manet in te , written after Madeleine's death in 1938 and published in 1951. In this he recognizes that his plan to combat his homosexuality through marriage has failed.

In Die and Will , Gide addresses the following topics:

First part

Chapter I:

  • Early childhood in Paris
  • Development of "bad habits" (he masturbates with the caretaker's son)
  • Loneliness as an only child without playmates
  • Mother's family (Rondeaux) in Rouen

Chapter II:

Chapter III:

Chapter IV:

  • The cousins ​​in Rouen
  • Move to Montpellier
  • Importance of taking sides, including on questions of religion
  • Beginning of the (partly faked) diseases

Chapter V:

  • Aunt's adultery
  • Discovery: "I'm not like the others"
  • Observation of the growth of a gladiolus
  • Secret adoration of the cousin Emmanuèle (in reality Madeleine)

Chapter VI:

Chapter VII:

  • Feeling of being "chosen"
  • Discussions about raising children
  • Discovery of fornication
  • Enjoy reading

Chapter VIII:

  • Love for Emmanuèle
  • Religious initiation and crisis of faith
  • Return to the Ecole alsacienne, then to the Lycée Henri-IV
  • Friendship with Pierre Louÿs
  • First attempts at writing

Chapter IX:

  • Extra-marital relationship and illegitimate child of cousin Albert
  • Painting (Albert) and piano (André Gide)
  • Chance encounter with Gauguin
  • Beginning of writing

Chapter X:

  • Art and music as influencers of literature
  • Visits to literary salons , including those of Stéphane Mallarmé
  • Contemporary literary currents
  • End of gloomy childhood
  • Problem of the truthfulness of the memoir

Second part

Chapter I:

Chapter II:

  • Encounter with Oscar Wilde
  • Homosexuality: final admission in Algiers
  • End of friendship with Pierre Louÿs
  • Rediscovery of religion in the face of the decadent western world
  • Death of the mother → feeling of freedom
  • Engagement to Emmanuèle

The title

Proposed by the translator Johanna Borek, common German-language titles dying and becoming , taken from the poem Blessed longing from the West-Eastern Divan by Goethe ( "And as long as you not have / this: Die and be / Are you an only gloomy guest / On the dark earth. ")

Like the poem by Goethe, the original French title is an allusion to a verse from the Gospel of John : “If the grain of wheat does not fall into the earth and die, it remains alone; but when it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it; and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. “(Elberfeld Bible, Joh. 12,24-25).

The difference between the translation proposed by Borek and the original meaning of the title is that where Borek's title and Goethe's formulation encourage people to follow the way of life preached and practiced by Christ, to renounce lust (the death of the grain of wheat) and the To strive for eternity (the fruit that the grain of wheat produces through its death), Gide himself - in his book as in his title - describes how he failed to follow this moral in his life : He was a grain of wheat that did not die.

In addition to this general meaning, which refers to the Bible, the French title also has a more tangible, physical aftertaste: Gide often describes his homosexual and autoerotic actions, whereby his seed, for which the wheat grain is a metaphor, naturally does not produce human fruit.

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