French Poet Research Articles

La traduction poétique comme enrichissement et processus transculturel : Julio Herrera y Reissig traduit Albert Samain

This work focuses on the unusual, poetic affinity between the Uruguayan poet, Julio Herrera y Reissig (1875–1910), and the French poet, Albert Samain (1858–1900), that took shape in Julio Herrera y Reissig’s Spanish translation of some of Samain’s poems from his 1898 volume of poems Aux flancs du vase. Our objective is not to write a critical review of Herrera y Reissig's translations. Instead, we aim to identify the similarities between the two poets. Thus, our contrastive analysis will demonstrate the affinities between the French author and his Uruguayan translator. In this collection, Samain was able to transpose the emotions aroused in him by the radiant landscapes and by certain moments in his daily life into terse, sensual and harmonious verse. Even though his style did not in any way conform with the poetic world of Modernism, full of exotic fragrances, colours, swans and characters from the classic world, it gave Herrera y Reissig the opportunity to creatively rework the original text and produce some truly remarkable transformations. These poems in Alexandrine verse place nature centre stage, and the sensations shared by both poets are evoked by their choice of colours and fragrances, by their combinations of sound and the profusion of images of rare intensity.

Biology and technology: guarding, nurturing, and governing life

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed perceptions of human mortality. Statistics of infection and vaccination rates dominate news bulletins. An aphorism by the French poet and critic Paul Valery captur...

Remarks, Ruminations, and Cogitations: Poetry and Thinking in Nathalie Quintane, Jacques Jouet, and Christophe Tarkos

Abstract To examine the relationship between poetry and thought, the present study focuses on the kind of thought that Plato defined as reasoning (dianoia) as opposed to total understanding (noesis). Its aim is to show how poetry interacts with dianoia in the writings of three contemporary French poets, namely Nathalie Quintane, Jacques Jouet, and Christophe Tarkos. After considering the different theoretical perspectives outlined by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, it examines poetry’s relation with thought in two key areas: firstly the significance of textual fragmentation and its implications for poetic understanding, and secondly the persistence of the seeing–saying dichotomy insofar as it maps out the ideal space of poetic language. The capacity of poetry for self-reflection, its integration of critical thought, the use of repetition and redundancy, and the notion of the materiality of poetic expression are topics that the present study further explores in order to gauge the significance of the poetry–thought nexus.

Anglo-French Poetic Exchanges in the Little Magazines, 1908–1914

This article demonstrates the extent and significance of exchange between English and French poets in the years leading up to World War I, a crucial period for the development of modern Anglophone poetry. Through archival research, I trace the growing interest in French poetry of Imagist poets F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, exhibited in various little magazines including the New Age, Poetry Review, Poetry and Drama, Poetry, the New Freewoman and the Egoist. Moreover, I show that such interest was reciprocated by contemporary French poets, notably Henri-Martin Barzun and Guillaume Apollinaire, who published works by English poets in their respective little magazines Poème et Drame and Les Soirées de Paris. This suggests that not only were modern English poets influenced by their French counterparts, but they were also given a voice in the Francophone artistic world, resulting in a unique moment of cross-channel poetic exchange before the war.

Onze poèmes de Marinetti dans “Anthologie-Revue” (1898-1900). Édition et commentaire

This paper provides the first integral edition of eleven poems by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. These eleven poems were all published from march 1898 to january 1900 in a now very rare journal: “Anthologie-Revue de France et d’Italie”. In these pages one can see Marinetti at work, ten years before the foundation of Futurism, both as a french poet and as a fin-de-siècle poet, both as a poet in verse and as a poet in prose. Since “Anthologie-Revue” was printed in Milan by a parisian editor, its redaction group was deeply concerned with franco-italian cultural relations. In this context, along the Milan-Paris axis, we can examine Marinetti’s earliest poetry and its evolution from sonnet to free verse. A decade before launching his avant-garde movement, young Marinetti faces the very last wave of the nineteenth-century Symbolism, showing a general predilection for french poetry. Moreover he had composed french verse since his adolescence. A main editorial principle is at the basis of the present work: the dedication preceding each poem and the place and date following it are always transcripted and possibly commented. New data about european literary contacts are thus documented. New information and details about circumstances of composition are often offered. Texts receiving a new light from either a contemporary historical event or a particular place and landscape.

“BURNT TO THE BONE” WITH LOVE, DAMNATION AND SIN: PHÆDRA AS THE SWINBURNIAN “FEMME DAMNÉE”

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is famous for his uniquely “bizarre” female characters. His contemporary critics as well as many of the researchers who touched upon his work have interpreted his female characters to be “obsessive,” “masochistic,” and in some cases even “sadistic.” Phædra is one of his characters who suffered the most because of this misconception. Rarely referenced at all, she has been regarded as a one-dimensional “masochist” who lacks psychological and emotional depth and whose only driving force is her desire for death. However, a close reading of Swinburne’s short poem reveals Phædra’s innermost anxieties and places her in the narrative of the Swinburnian femme damnée inspired by Les Fleurs du Mal of the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Swinburne’s “Phædra” is remarkable in that it also serves as an exceptional representation of Sappho (c. 630 - c. 570 BC) in Victorian England. This paper highlights Swinburne’s aversion towards the Victorian mock-morality, as well as some of his life-long influences. Furthermore, this paper defines Phædra in a new light by considering the classical originals, Sappho’s and Baudelaire’s works, and even a twentieth-century retelling by the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).

Aragon transi par le chant

Aragon, more than any other French poet, has been interpreted in song some two hundred times. Why is music so important in his poetry? During the war (1939-1945), he himself encouraged the resistance fight with his poems, written as an inspiration to restore morale, and the memory of the nation’s voice; in the communist party as well, singing was a way to come together and maintain hope. Music, generally speaking, stands beyond truth and lies, the real and the imaginary. But this oral style, cultivated by the poet-novelist, mingles with orality in a darker sense, illustrated in psychoanalysis by the sufferings of primal love, including jealousy and self-destruction, which provides the framework for the novel La mise à mort (1965).

Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law

This short commentary on the legacy and significance of Peter Fitzpatrick’s scholarship tells of the divergent approaches he and I take in relation to the “feminine” in the writings of French poet, playwright, fictional author, and theorist, Hélène Cixous. Peter, on his side, is ever reminding us of the constituent connection between law and its origin and the impossibility of the “feminine law” escaping a scheme fixated on a specific patriarchal content. I, on my side, am optimistically yearning for a Cixousian “feminine” who eludes a return to the origin and who fearlessly transgresses the law(s) of the patriarchal. Herein, I theorize the essential difference between Fitzpatrick’s “feminine law” and my reading of the law of the Cixousian “feminine” as relating back to our (differing?) approaches to creativity and originality. To my mind, on the question of law’s creativity, Peter aligns less with Cixous and more with Jacques Derrida, who many have accused of positing a negative conception of creation. Applied to Peter, while ever endeavoring to situate law in relation to creative undertakings, such as literature and poetry, following his determinate/responsiveness model, the persistence of the negative is inescapable and the “feminine” is always already integral to law.

Histórias Fotografadas.

Histories of life and the recovery of personal images bring us to Charles Baudelaire’s reflection on the artist as “a man of the crowd and the world. The association made by the French poet refers to the way of thinking of the “present” time as an essential material for recording and immortalizing a particular time and cultural history. “The world’s man and” are related to the common man and the daily heroisms not found in the pages - and screens - of a mass industry that annihilates singularities. Enrapturated by this conception one can think of everyday history and present history. History of those who are alienated from it.The project “Photographed History, Shared History” is a blog-album of the daily life of residents of Cotia, centered on history fragments of photographs chosen and narrated by the central characters of the moment captured by them. The blog contains part of texts transcribed and “transcriados” by the Communication and Expression students of the Business Management and Industrial Production Management courses at Fatec Cotia. With this exercise, not only these residents but their interviewers became memory builders. Sherazades provoking the desire to hear, read and see the characters that - once again taking Baudelaire - allow a portrait of Modernity.Coinciding with this proposal, “Memories that do not fade - despite the Alzheimer”, photographic exhibition that brings together memories of people from the city with the disease.This communication intends to present these projects, analyzing these memories and the importance of narrating.

Roteiro coletivo: a ideia do cinema neorrealista

Fascism had brought hunger and destruction to Italy. Italian film makers gathered to reconstruct cinema pursuing another ideal. Neorealist films had as their main aspect the fact of being social, not only in the theme but also in their way of production. The movement, according to André Bazin, followed formal and aesthetic criteria, features that had been accomplished by film makers since the creation of Cinecittà by Mussolini. However, even during this regime, some artists already resisted the fascist view, a fact that can be observed in films like Ossessione, by Luchino Visconti; I bambini ci guardano, by Vittorio De Sica and Quattro passi tra le nuvole, by Alessandro Blasetti. Inspired by the studies in Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, by Umberto Barbaro’s translation of Pudovkin, by foreign literature, besides the collaboration of the French Poetic Realism film directors, a creative dynamic was produced centered in the collective writing of scripts which played an important role in the resistance to fascism in Italian cinema. This study, in particular, analyzes Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione.

Diagnosing, Resisting, Yielding – or How the Doctor Faces the Inevitable Tragedy

According to the 18th-century French doctor, Francois-Xavier Bichat, “la vie est l’ensemble des forces qui resistent a la mort” (“life consists in the sum of the functions that resist death”), in other words, life is by nature continuously resisting. More than one century later, the French poet Paul Valery declared “Vous autres medecins, vous etes les champions, les strateges de la lutte de la vie individuelle contre la loi de la vie moyenne” (Valery 52), by which he would seem to suggest tha...

The Hunter and the Dreamer: Roy Campbell’s Literary Personality in Anthony Akerman’s Dark Outsider

This article considers readings of the life and literary personality of the South African poet Roy Campbell. Drawing on Anthony Akerman’s play about Campbell, Dark Outsider, to support the argument, it argues that readings that limit themselves to the biographical, which tend to foreground his hypermasculine, colonial persona, or the psychological, which read this persona as a mask for a sensitive nature, tend to downplay both the literary influences for, and the contextual nature of, his well-documented self-inventions. This article suggests that these were in tune with the modernist era in which his writing emerged, and drew in particular on the respective influences of the French poet Charles Baudelaire and Campbell’s friend, the artist and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis.

Поэма Юрия Сопова «Артюр Рембо» (1919): текст и контексты

The article introduces publication of the full text of the narrative poem “Arthur Rimbaud” by the Omsk poet Yuri (Pyotr Ivanovich) Sopov (1897–1919), written shortly before his tragic death in the explosion at A.V. Kolchak’s residence on August 25 (or 26), 1919. The text previously had been known by fragments only, by virtue of quotations included in the newspaper obituary by the poet Georgy Maslov, who briefly survived Sopov. A number of details allow us to conclude that Sopov is fairly accurate when rendering facts of Rimbaud’s life and must have been familiar with the French poet’s biography, not just with echoes of the legend. Therefore, the numerous occasions in the poem, where he prefers fiction over fact, should be considered as the result of a deliberate choice. In the perception of contemporaries, the image of the author of the poem partially merged with the mythologized image of its hero. First of all, this concerns poets of the circle of the Omsk literary and artistic association “Chervonnaya Troika” and writers close to the group “Pamir” (“Siberian brigade”). The poet Leonid Martynov (1905–1980) repeatedly turned to the image of Rimbaud, translated his poems, compared his image, biography and character to his own, in poetry and in prose. The article shows that the perception of the French poet in Martynov’s creative laboratory during his long career was mediated by the memory of Yuri Sopov’s poem.

Семантика цветообозначения в лирике С.А. Есенина и Э. Верхарна

We consider the color designation features in the poetic texts of Russian and French poets. An appeal to the lyric poetry of great writers from a chosen perspective expands and concretizes the existing ideas about the individual features of the authors’ style. Analysis object is the language units of poetry by S.A. Esenin and E. Verhaeren, containing color semantics. A comparative analysis of several works representative within the framework of the declared theme reveals the similarities and differences in the color palette of Esenin and Verhaeren’s lyrics. We consider the semantics of blue, white, yellow, red colors and their shades in poems of poets. Special attention is paid to the golden color poetics, the use of which is also focused on religious symbolism. We designate the vectors of changes in the set of colors in different periods of Esenin and Verhaeren’s creative activity, the dependence of the changes in the color scale on the general pathos of the poets and the events of their personal biography is determined. We clarify the reasons for the differences in color solutions in the landscape and philosophical poetry, explained by the authors’ belonging to different literary trends and national traditions. We provide examples of discrepan-cies in existing Russian translations of E. Verhaeren’s works with the provision of our own trans-lations.

Aproximaciones a las poetas francesas de la Belle Époque en España: traducciones actuales de la obra de Anna de Noailles

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest for French female poets as it has been proved by the translations workflow in Spain. The aim of this study is to define the Belle Époque translations as well as the main channels of reception emphasizing on Anna de Noailles’ translations. Some of the work of this wellknown poet was translated by famous Spanish authors such as Fortún, Marquina or Maristany. Nowadays, two poetry books have been published: Las pasiones y las tumbas, translated by Mireia Alonso Ribeiro (2011 [2020]), and El honor de sufrir, by Julio Pollino Tamayo (2018). By means of a diachronic study of Noailles’ translations, we will analyse the reception of her poetry throughout a study of some of her poems from a translation studies point of view

Рецепция лирики Анри де Ренье в творчестве М. Волошина и И. Северянина

The article examines the reception of the poetry by a French poet Henri de Regnier in the works of Maximilian Voloshin and Igor Severyanin. Voloshin was a passionate promoter of Regnier in Russia; he appealed to him in criticism, translated his poems and prose, and considered him to be a forerunner of “neo-realism,” a new stage of development in European and Russian literature. The interest of Severyanin in the work of Regnier develops under the influence of Voloshin’s 1910 article “Henri de Regnier.” The young Severyanin was influenced by this article and used accurate translations of Regner’s two poems included in the article for his own translation experiments: he even made the same mistake as Voloshin when translating one of these poems. Compared to Voloshin’s, Severyanin’s versions are less accurate; they have stylistic shifts and ironic tones absent in the original. Thus, the example of Voloshin’s and Severyanin’s different attitudes to Regnier’s poetry allows me to trace two different tendencies in the reception of Western authors within the culture of the so-called Russian Silver age: enthusiastic discipleship, more typical for Russian symbolists, and stylistic play and ironic distancing, more typical for Russian futurists.

La représentation des poétesses dans la presse de la fin de la Belle Époque (1908-1914)

"This work aims at observing and comparing the image of French poets and poetess given by the national press during the late Belle Époque. More and poetess given by the national press during the late Belle Époque. More precisely, we study the photographs published by Les Annales politiques et littéraires, Femina and Comœdia, between 1908 and 1914. We shall prove that female writers obtained public recognition immediately before the First World War."

Соперники в символизме

The article examines the reception of Western European modernism in Russia in the late 19 th — early 20th centuries, with the emphasis on the phenomenon of the “crooked mirror” of a different nation perception, which not only endows the work of a foreign author with new functions, but sometimes also gives it a new scale (as with Byron, Zola, some of whose novels were published in Russian translation earlier than in the original in France, the Parnassian poet Jose Maria de Heredia, who received real fame in Russia, in contrast to the very short recognition in his homeland). The subject of the analysis is the texts that are maximally indicative and convincing for the stated topic, above all the translations from Paul Verlaine by Fyodor Sologub, who, along with Bryusov, opened the French poet to the Russian reader, and his original poems, created in the course of and largely as a result of work on translations. The systematization of observations on specific texts makes it possible to conclude that Russian Symbolists, adhering to sometimes opposite views on art, relying on the authority of Baudelaire and Verlaine who are perceived in France more as predecessors of Symbolism than its representatives, walked alongside them, never meeting along the way, but recognizing the “other” as “equal”.

N. V. Leontiev’s Fables Adapted from J. La Fontaine

Nikolai Leontiev is a Russian 18th-century fabulist, esteemed by contemporaries but later forgotten. The paper shows that seven of his fables are based on J. La Fontaine’s examples. There are two patterns of reception. In one of them the plot and personae are the same as in the source text, while in the other pattern they are changed. The moral usually stays the same, but in some cases, Leontiev makes certain changes, which reflect his ideology. Among his fables The Three Kings is especially interesting. It is based on la Fontaine’s fable The Frogs Who Desired a King, but the plot is transformed so as to express an opposite idea: unlike the pessimistic French poet, Leontiev optimistically believes in the reality of a good social order.

«Hölderlin даст объяснение»: поэтическая мысль Фридриха Гёльдерлина и ее рецепция Борисом Поплавским

The article focuses on the two notions recurrent in Boris Poplavsky’s late-period oeuvre, namely the «Paradise and Kingdom of friends» and the «Republic of the Sun». These are linked to Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetical philosophy, which solicited vivid interest among the German and French poets of the 1910–1930s. It is assumed that the semantic aura of the image of the fl ag, one of the most frequent in Poplavsky, might have been formed in a «dialogue» with Hölderlin’s key poem Hälfte des Lebens. Besides, the poem Quietly the City Rustles, which holds a place of prominence in his posthumous collection Snowy Hour (1936), seems to be an imitation of the fi rst stanza of Hölderlin’s famous elegy Brot und Wein.