Books finished in March 2024
Collected Poetry
Guy de Maupassant
(all translations mine and perfunctory)
Maupassant is mostly famous for his short stories and to a lesser extent his novels (both high school perennials in France). Any serious schoolboy can tell you about his themes : love, death, Paris and Normandy.
His poetry, rather more obscure, deals with similar subjects, among which the Norman countryside might get a slight edge over the hustle and bustle of the capital. Bucolic wilderness for verses, cosmopolitan city for prose. Many such cases!
I would above all love those street encounters, Those ardors of the flesh that a look mere triggers, Those trysts of one hour, gone at once, Those kisses exchanged utterly at random.
During harsh winters, when rough cold enters The cottage walls and people in bed, When hollow roads are filled with snow, Shadows would approach her window at night, Stains over the glum parlor of the horizon, And roam like wolves around her home.
All that in impeccable alexandrines, very classical, respecting the traditional rules of French versification, and mostly in short pieces. The best of them though is a long one, The Last Stroll, a tender and melancholy tale of an old married couple dying together in the park of their dilapidated castle. And one’s got to wonder: did Maupassant, at thirty, a dissolute wastrel and probably syphilitic already, think there was still time for him to go down the trad path? Or is it more wistful longing for the road not taken? Makes u think.
Besides places and women, Maupassant also loved Bouilhet (so do I); he produced a rather overlong funeral eulogy, and more interestingly, quasi-pastiches of a couple of Bouilhet’s poems.
While he was looking calmly at the flame Which poured sheets of color from the ceiling, A dream had come aflutter over his soul, Like a purple bird over a flower.
Those are interesting, but not representative. Maupassant’s poetic generation in France was the Parnasse (of which Bouilhet was a forerunner), characterized with extreme attention to form, slightly pedantic love of antiquity, and a sometimes prurient fascination for exoticism. Now, as I said, Maupassant respected the form, though not to the point of show-off virtuosity like Banville or even Hérédia. But as for antiquity or exoticism, he really does not care ; remember the part of Bel-Ami when he mocks fashionable Japanese kitsch. Sure, he mentions Columbus twice, and compares some women as historical or mythological figures (Phryne, Vénus, Cleopatra), but those are just banalities. At most he’s leaning toward the untamed, pagan side of Leconte de Lisle, when he sings of the crepuscular and supernatural wilderness. But what truly interests him is the world where he leaves, and that’s nineteenth-century France. Haters gonna hate.
Why abandon my dream and happiness When I looked at that blonde girl? Why was Columbus so tormented When, through the fog, he glimpsed a word.
God, who can do everything, cannot not be!
Then, in those festive days, we roamed The countryside as hunters, the nature as poets, Don’t you remember that happy time?”
4/5
The Chimera Brigade - Last Rebirth
Serge Lehman, Stéphane de Caneva
A rather unconvincing follow-up (or spin-off) to the Chimera Brigade I once reviewed. Too much exposition, absurd action sequences, cringe “urban” dialogue… The attempt to modernize the series was dubious to begin with, since what interest the comics had was to showcase a forgotten literary era. In execution, it fails dismally. Few heroes, and most of them spruced-up versions of the old ones. Sad!
1,5/5