Louis Boulanger, "To my Friend Saint-Beuve" (1836

Though Louis Boulanger was known as one of the standard-bearers for visual Romanticism – considered within the community as equal to his comrade Delacroix for a number of years – he also had a strong literary bent. Here is one of his few surviving poems, dedicated to the Romanticist literary critic Saint-Beuve and originally published in an anthology published by the female Romanticist poet Marie Mennessier-Nodier, whose father Charles Nodier was one of the movement's chief strategists and thinkers:
  
To My Friend Sainte-Beuve, (1836)

No, I have not received that highest gift of grace
That makes the work, when all else dies and is effaced
Stand yet, immortal, so that at some distant date       
The glory of the author scintillates as bright
As on those grand days where the town, with solemn rites,
Parades his compositions brought to consecrate.
But nonetheless these Florentines, Genius' elect,
That true to life your Muse before my view projects,
Come often with their light that drowns and leaves me stunned,
And then at times, alas! My spirit has aspired
To believe, poor fool, that one ray of that fire
Piercing through its shade, would render it fecund.

 

  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from Aristide Marie, Le Peintre Poète: Louis Boulanger. 1925. La Vie et l’Art Romantiques, Floury, Éditeur: Paris. p. 45.

Newly Translated Note from Gautier to Boulanger

Here is a very fun & poetically playful little note from the Jeunes-Freance co-founder and poet Théophile Gautier to his fellow co-founder, the painter Louis Boulanger, written about 2-3 years (timelines are hazy) after the group stopped functioning as a defined unit – though as we see here the members remained dedicated to the networks of interdisciplinary collaboration that they had established through it and had already become a defining element of the avant-garde or otherstream community. I've tried to be as playful with my translation as Théo was in the original:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

14 Jan., 1836 

 

My dear Louis,

 

I’m exceedingly vexed at having made you wait like this; but here’s how it all went down; I was horribly stuffed up with a cold and forced to fold myself up in a domain of sweetsoftness, at the gushing fountain of herbal tea and marshmallow. The lovely child[1] has come twice to my place in Paris, I was in Passy,

 

With my disgruntled lungs in huge surges immersed

In those smooth creamy syrups Charlard thought up first.[2]

 

Upon returning I discover your letter, moreover an epistle of more of the unfortunate’s elegiacs,[3] which breaks my heart two times for the two of us missing one session here. I’ll sneak up on you from behind with the aforementioned beauty Friday or Saturday. We’ll get to work lighting the studio with our gaze if daylight doesn’t do it, and I think that the model’s eyes shall model passing well[4]. Incidentally should it have gone dark as in an oven,[5] your canvas is so dazzling and luminous that you’ll see everything else by it. 

 

I yearn for you to have cash, women, street cred (you’ve got that), fitness, inheritances out of the blue, all the wonders of the world, could you only take to heart each day twenty cartloads of enviers all frozen flat with rage.

 

Théophile Gautier.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] A model who they seem to have been employing jointly, thus implying that Théo (trained as a painter but kicked out of art school for distributing Romanticist propaganda) was still painting a bit on the side, at least; or, if he was finding her for Boulanger alone, we are glimpsing another often-overlooked form of communal and interdisciplinary collaboration.

 

[2] The chemist and pharmacist Antione François Boutron Charlard, an early proponent of hydrotherapy. As far as I can tell this is an off-the-cuff improvisation by Théo.

 

[3] plus une épitre des plus élégiaques de l’infortunée

 

[4] sufficans, an archaic orthographical distortion used only in verse, resurrected by Gautier and other ultra-Romantics.

 

[5] The french for oven, four, may be an anglophone pun extending his french wordplay upon one (une) and two (deux) in this passage.

  

   

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from Aristide Marie, Le Peintre Poète: Louis Boulanger. 1925. La Vie et l’Art Romantiques, Floury, Éditeur: Paris. p. 63.

Auguste Bouzenot, "The Durga" – 1834 Avant-Romanrticist Comparative Theology

This description of a Hindu religious festival was published in the seminal anthology Annales Romantiques in 1833, and bears witness to the early avant-garde’s attempts to engage meaningfully with Eastern religion. Like most such attempts, it fails to fully escape a Eurocentric perspective. Its author Bouzenot [pronounce: Booze-e-know] was a young Romanticist philosopher, Liberal social theorist, and historian of thought whose experimental essay veers into list-poetry recalling Rabelais’ medieval satirical lists and looks forward to those of the Surrealists and otherstream poets. Here he compares a Hindu festival to the local traditional festivals (often with Pagan roots) familiar to French readers. The exercise in comparative religion manages to make a nod, both in content and style, to each of the main strains within ultra-Romanticism at the time: the Orientalist, Medievalist, and Frenetic tendencies. The autumn festival being described is Durga Puja, dedicated to the benevolent maternal war-deity Durga. Local versions of the festival are celebrated across Eastern and north-eastern India. The broad outlines of the festival as described here seem fairly accurate. 

The Durga (1834)
by Auguste Bouzenot

translated by Olchar E. Lindsann


It’s safe to say there are few families so negligent of time-honoured customs and paternal festivals, as not to elect in the chapel of Notre-Dame, on December 26, the day of St. Stephen, ancient patron of that chapel, a bishop of fools from among the sub-deacons, or rather as uncouth tongues would say, the drunk deacons of the cathedral.
Not to appropriately celebrate on the first of January the festival of fools, by causing old shoes to be burned in a censer and forcing the bishop to inhale this noxious odour;
Not to chow down on the cake of kings at the epiphany,
Not to march on Fat Thursday alongside the veiled, violated, violed ox,
Not to go watch the giant set aflame in the Rue aux Ours,
The wicker dragon of Notre-Dame, the day of Rogation,
The gaping maw of the good St. Vermin in Poitiers,
The growlie at Metz,
The gargoyle in Rouen,
The tarasque in Tarascon,
The salted chair in Troyes,
A Goliath or a Ferrand made of straw on Ash Wednesday and so many other dragons, that of the Rock of Turpin, that of St. André, that of St. Bernard de Comminges;
Not to lend a hand at the University’s festival of fools.
At the bonfire of St. Jean [Cathedral] and at that of St. Pierre,
At the festival of the ass,
At the festival of the abbot of cuckolds,
At the festival of kalends,
At the festival of idiots,
At the festival of the abbot of the peanut gallery,
At the festival of the innocents,
And other revelries said to be barbarities;
Not to crack walnuts in St. Michel,
Send love-knots in St. Valentin,
Not to… not to…
Not to hurl one’s durga into the Ganges in the great festival of August 25.
The Hindus have in general religiously preserved the dogmas and rites of Brahma. Nor is he truly faithful who does not piously preserve his domestic gods, gods of the mat where he finds his repose, gods of the weapons which serve to repel his enemies, god of his hearth always welcoming to the stranger. Everybody has his idol in the most appropriate part of the house, everybody has his great gods uncannily decked out with the head of a crocodile, serpent or cow, with the stout plug on the chief, elegantly multicoloured, blues, yellows, reds, whites or greens, silent emblems, fantastic, insistent, who grimace marvelously with all of the human emotions, gods of the cradle and the tomb, gods of the young spouse and the old man, of water and fire, faithful friends whom everybody approaches each evening to confide their most secret thoughts quietly in the ear, gods of harvests, who cause to blossom the roses of cashmere and sonebac with which you perfume your hair; splendid gods! indeed.
The festivities begin at the new moon in the month of August and last three days. As soon as the sun on the first day leaps radiantly upon the Ganges’ current, you intone, face against the earth:
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Thus you purify the house, you render it white and clean;
You chase off the evil spirit who blows upon the harvest, who casts curses in passing and who the night visits in the gardens to rip away the leaves of magatelli leaves which make the serpents die;
Then the family assembles, you take council, you make prayers together;
Then you don the Durga in rich clothing, in long veils of garlands; your great sword is in its left hand, in the other is the head of the malicious angel. Next commence the lamentations and wailings; you prostrate yourself at the feet of the god, you strike the earth with your brow, you shed many tears; the offerings and prayers rival those of the first two days. The god’s going to have to be abandoned, divine mercy! And you continue to produce a profusion of sobs and of gifts; it’s then that you must set yourself to drying that depthless reservoir of woes that we retain at the root of the soul in order to find nothing but joy from now on. The third day arises.
Ring out, you clarions, trumpets, fanfares, cymbals, bells, tambourines, with forceful clamour, to bear witness to my joy; everything’s mad with pleasure, drunk with ecstasy, everything’s upset, stirred up, thrashed about, twisted. And the orchestra spreads its great flood of music and its uproar of tom-tom tumbling like cataracts, oh! how beautiful it is then, the Ganges, my river of wide banks, of majestic blue waters so transparent! It would be difficult to perceive them overlain as they are by thousands of barges bedecked and mantled in rich array. One would call it an immense robe strewn with clusters of blooms; my variegated barges must be seen, going two by two naught but two, and joined by a moveable plank in the middle of which is the god.
Someone is about to give the signal, listen: it is the high priest in person!
Baren, zamet, fouchi.
And suddenly the boats part from each other, and with the god who vanishes into the waves, with a thousand peals of trumpets, a thousand cries of joy, it’s up to anybody who shall catch some shred of the Dourgha’s garments, some flowers from his garland in order to offer them to it next year.
 

from Les Annales romantiques: Recueil de morceaux chosis de littérature contemporain, ed. Charles Malo. 1834. Janet: Paris, pp. 30-35.                                     

from the collection of the Revenant Archive.


Rêvenance #8 – NOW AVAILABLE!

Rêvenance: A  Zine of Hauntings From Underground Histories, No. 8

  

This magazine is the main printed venue for new research and translations concerning the Bouzingo, and the flagship journal of the Revenant Editions series, dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and other countercultures. It includes essays, translations, and many experimental forms of historical writing and research that connect those traditions to continuing radical communities today.

  

Jeunes-France/French Romanticist stuff in the new number includes a spread about Gérard de Nerval in prison (letter and poem), a Boulanger print of Paganini in prison, a frenetiuc poem by the female Romanticist Anaïs Ségalas, and an avant-Romanticist essay comparing a Hindu ceremony to local French peasant festivals.

This issue contains more recent and more early work than any yet, with a Dada review by Louis Aragon & Dada poetry by Tristan Tzara & Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes; Russian Futurist poetry by Aleksei Kruchyonykh and Vasilisk Gnedov, an anti-survey of mid-20th Century underground poetry by Jim Leftwich, and contemporary “revenant collaborations” between living and dead poets including Michael Dec, Volodymyr Bilyk, Dirk Vekemans, Retorico Unentesi, Olchar Lindsann, Nina de Callias, & more, an essay by John Wilkins on Con-Lang from 1668, texts by Gérard de Nerval on his stay in prison and his Louis Bouanger's lithograph of Paganini in prison, skeletal drawings & texts by Moloch and the feminist romantic Anaïs Ségalas, and an 1834 avant-garde attempt at comparative religion.

Featuring: 
The Dead: Gérard de Nerval / John Wilkins / Tristan Tzara / Anaïs Ségalas / Vasilisk Gnedov / Louis Boulanger / Alecksei Kruchyonich / Nina de Callias / Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes / Niccolò Paganini / Moloch / Louis Aragon / Auguste Bouzenot

& The Living: Jim Leftwich / Michael Dec / Gleb Kolomiets / Olchar E. Lindsann / Dirk Vekemans / Volodymyr Bilyk / Retorico Unentesi
   

  
25 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. May, A.Da. 104/A.H. 189 (2020)
$4.50 + $2.00 s/h
   
Soft deadline for contributions to the next issue: Aug. 15.
send to monoclelash@gmail.com

Philothée O'Neddy, Preface & Epilogue to "The Enchanted Ring"

Here's the verse preface and afterward to Philothée O'Neddy's 1842 novel "The Enchanted Ring", which I reviewed in Rain Taxi awhile back.

One of my few reservations about the translation (which didn't make it into the published article) is that it does not include his long preface in verse, which is a key document in understanding O'Neddy's theory and practice as well as an odd and tongue-in-cheek text like the rest of the book, and includes the verse afterward only in a bare transliteration (a much lesser sin).
  
So here are both of those at last – if you take MY advice, you'll order the book and read these in the appropriate places – down the line I'll likely publish them as a chapbook with just that in mind. (It's like translation fanfic for another publisher – fantrans?):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PREFACE

At the unwonted birth of a preface in verse,
kind reader, I wager, here you’ll sit quite morose:
–“Ha!” say ye, “if thus far these prefaces in prose,
in abusing their right to sedate the universe,
Fear not to join to their one thousand quirks
that of donning a tone lyric and grandiose,
to mount up to the heights to prognosticate,
to create, to explain the arcana, the lore,
to delimit[1] both man and god, both to abrade
in pointless eloquence, in limitless ardours,
What say now, what do now, what will this one dare!
Why, what will be the verse if the prose begins there!
Verse! . . . innate dialect of symbol and of dream,
whose most devoted goal, exclusive mission’s
to outrage, to exhaust, doubling hyperbole,
exaggerate the tip of exaggeration! . . .”

Hold on, dear reader, settle down, let me plead!
Your fear foundation lacks; on my alexandrines
deign to bind your eyes less sternly and less maudlin;
They act bourgeoisly, no aristocracy,
no formal chariots to drive some theory,
no triumphant tambourines, no noble clarions;
Abdicating at will their right to be rhapsodes,
naught in them imitates the lofty pomp of odes;
no resplendent robes burdeneth their kidneys.

Elsewise, wanting just to arm this peristyle
with a brief overview of the opus at hand,
I don’t think I could find here however I scan
motif of puffed-up noise in the data or style,
matter for monument; for all in question’s
just a fable, alas! quite flippant and futile,
just a humble novel whose whole narration
here in folly disputes its whole conception.

Ah! if this were, reader, a book puritanical,
one of those knights of justice and of verity,
whose eloquence files away tenaciously
cast-iron prejudice, the ancient manacle
which garrottes the corpus of society,
such great books as we call humanitarian
thinkers,[2] neo-christian, moral, utilitarian;
Were this one of those tomes where the gnostic cult[3],
within gothic tombs the slabs’ carved words consults,
resurrects the doctrine of feudal ways,
the blazon, the dagger, the sandals, tomes of praise,
the monk, the noble, the convent, and the rook;
Were this one of those tomes which, with a kindly look,
endeavouring to read in th’enigmatic book
of two sphinxes we call both the head and the heart,
construct for bourgeois taste the genre intimate,[4]
(that maudlin genre which the reviews in choral parts
refused the gift of their respect not long ago;)
Then indeed might you fear the prefacer arrogant,
I’d fashion myself a princely portico!

But no; let not your thought be so stupefied there;
Neither can I nor would I burst into fanfare,
for my tale boasts of no other pretension,
in its absurdity than common sense condemned,
than that of seeming, on the mould of Donkeyskin,[5]
A frivolous thing here spun from fiction.[6]
Yep, my goal, my intent, my oath, ’tis to amuse;
for no other concern did I pester my muse:
Modest, I wished quite simply to augment
the Thousand and One Nights with scraps of supplement.
Thus, ’tis a fanciful and off-the-wall saga,
’tis, this candid stunt, in full chimera[7],
an unrealistic work, a flight ebullient,
’tis a steeple-chase, no guide-line, no baluster . . .
May at least some small bit of vigour and talent
on the style and form have projected some luster!

Yet, if my pronouncement were made law, – I’d assert
when one shapes epic systems and uncanny art,
you’ll find that a hundred, a thousand more charms
does the steeplechase hold than the olympic course;
That it calls for a truer arm and surefire hocks,
that it must be graced with more impregnable heart
into arcane[8] of forests to hurl its horse,
over rocks girded round by an anemic fog,
all athwart the rough shrubs, all athwart fallow balks,[9]
along cramped gorges, aslide from a greedy scarp,
and amidst all the perils, the pitfalls of bogs,
– Than in tracks to make a chariot hurtle,
on the smooth arena, secure between the hurdles.
– And I think the audacity that spurs my speech
will leave all my contemporaries really pleased;
especially the sons you find by myriads
spoofing Alcibiades’ mood rash-spirited.

[The following sections were cut from the published version]

I should wrap this thing up: these remarks are drawn out.
But grant me one last word, if I may? I’ve avowed
nothing to you that’s true, dear reader, my master.
The things I’ve claimed to you may have been more than patter
when noising it abroad, while standing here smugly,
that the volume you hold holds nothing relevant.
Strewn across all its chatter of frivolous study,
Under its irreverence, scarcely malevolent,
a few tricks, I’ll admit, edify for brief moments
with altruistic thought and noble sentiments.
You’ll sense dwelling therein a bit of melancholy;
bits of reason mixed with the foundations its folly.

Among its teasing trifles there fain would gleam through it
unaffected amour that speaks its language sacred.
The volatile creases of its moorish tunic
conceal there a chivalric heartbeat’s palpitations.
At least (for I should here be a tiny bit shyer),
to keep it there concealed has been my utmost aim.
I desired, I aspired that an Ideal flame
should penetrate this tale and shape it like a soul.

[The published version resumes here:]

Little tome,[10] now what good’s all this clamour and fire?[11]
Why haggle with your life like this, ô little tome?
When I know well, alas! your life shall stay so low!
When I don’t even know that you merit your life!
The prelates, our elite criticism’s doctors,
Shall they admit you to their baptism benign?
Where are, to guide you there, your godparents, your sponsors?
If you must go without, you shall soon be a pariah!
suffocated to hush . . . or by abuse assailed!
O my wretched canoe[12], without your guiding stars
rely upon my reason’s upsetting prognosis
that never shall you last, with your so-feeble sail,
to reach publicity’s high seas you see afar.
It scarcely can descry one modicum of hope
that the port governors, relinquishing their bias,
might license you, so frail, to cruise a couple days
without the fear of feuds with covetous pursuers,
among the titanic competition of canooers
that ever check and block the harbour from your eyes.

~~~~~~~

NOTES TO PREFACE:
[1] réglementer. Modern dictionaries suggest “regulate,” but that sense of the term seems to have developed after Dondey’s time; not only does it seem contextually discordant, but the 1828 Boniface French-English dictionary available to me does not even include the word, suggesting that 14 years later when these lines were written, it was still new and in flux (thus seductive to Dondey’s Romanticist sensibilities). My rendering is based on the 1828 definitions of Règlement, règlementaire, and regler.
[2] The use of the noun penseur as an adjective seems to have been something of a Romanticist key-word; one of the few online dictionaries who list its adjectival sense gives as its examples, three Romanticist texts from the 1830s (two by Dondey’s acquaintance Balzac and one by his close friend Borel) and one by the proto-Romantic Chenier, a major influence on them all, plus one by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau, who later engaged in research into avant-garde Romanticism: http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/penseur
[3] A rather daring rendering of culte savant.
[4] A term kicked around a fair bit in the early 19th Century, whose precise definition seems to have been evasive even at the time, based on contemporary references. Likely novels based on the analysis of individual psychology, such as those of Stendhal and Balzac–the characteristic that has gone on to define the modern Bourgeois novel.
[5] A fairy tale first written down by Perrault in the seventeenth century, combining a Cinderella motif with that of threatened incest.
[6] or, “in fact of fiction” Une chose amusante en fait de fiction.
[7] O’Neddy employs the noun as an adjective, as he often does.
[8] O’Neddy employs the adjective profond as a noun.
[9] guérets, “balks”, the unplowed ridge between the furrows in a field.
[10] In O’Neddy’s manuscript revised post-publication; the published version reads: “O my tome”
[11] Line 107 ends with flamme / flame, this line with feu / fire, evoking the title of O’Neddy’s seminal collection of avant-garde poetry, Feu et flamme / Fire and Flame.
[12] canot, here and below in the neologism canotins (canooers). Though in contemporary french the word has a broader connotation of small boats in general, both the 1835 Dictionnaire de l’Academie (and all earlier editions to 1694) and the 1828 Boniface French-English Dictionary refer specifically and exclusively to the canoes of Native American tribes – rendering this extended nautical analogy considerably more odd (particularly as this canoe sports a sail!).
  
~~~~~~
  
EPILOGUE
  
There’s a golden-hued dream by which oft I’m consoled
for the void you’re to meet, ô my frivolous trifle!
for the void without waking you’ll live in tomorrow. –
– ’Tis on a summer’s eve, beneath a roman sky.
I conjure, within a marble villa’s Eden,
a Lady and her page beside some tree’s foot seated.
The page, thanks to the final fires of the day,
to his fay is now reading, to the Dame he loves,
my tale where is portrayed love and the land of fays.
Now they both, roused in soul and with voices be-hushed,
are rushed in their keen haste to lavish me with praise.
Such pampering is found in spheres fortuitous!
When they’ve lauded him well, well exalted the poet,
they are caught up by bliss – tis mute and luminous –
wherefore the lady-love – grips the finger of her lover
who exults on his knees – with magic ring bestows it.
Then between them hovers a flame, a mystery:
flame which must remain veiled, a mystery untold…
as one veils the gods, keeps their grace under cover,
for the Muse and the Priest share a like modesty.
  
Then, the cloud descends, – and the pair arise…
  
While respiring the vast forest’s balsamic sap,
at random through the shadowy paths they ramble.
All across the network of tenebrous brambles,
upon horizon’s edge the moon, who reclines,
looks down and smiles on them like a Lady in White.
Each with other enlaced, they’re blithely wandering…
Just like two seraphim who, – while briefly they deign
to tread our lowly soil – even yet feel their wings.
Unceasingly their eyes are interweaving beams.
On a whim – in her voice of azure – now the Dame
stitches a tune by Cimarosa or of Weber …
anon she falls quiet, quite delighted to hear
The page who then declaims this sonnet fond and grave:
   
“I’m owner of a ring whose gold, a mirror sacred,
assimilates my thought and heart and soul entire.
Tis a charming talisman of sympathetic fire
that’s mine by way of love from a dark-eyed fay.
“I’m owner of a ring whose jurisdiction chaste
makes any but my Lady strike my eyes as vile
while making her for me the only maid alive,
who only may be stirred by dint of my embrace.
“I’m owner of a ring whose sacred fairie keeper,
from all my reveries of love and chivalry,
has made it manifest the whole ideal proud.
“I’m owner of a ring! . . . – should it be snatched away then,
when in the coffin’s midnight I shall be laid out,
to make them give it back to me shall I awaken!!”
   
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This version based mainly on Philothée O’Neddy, Poésies posthumes, 1878, Charpentier: Paris, pp. 216-218, but retaining some elements from Théophile Dondey de Santeny, Histoire d’un anneau enchanté: Roman de chevalerie, Undated [1841], Boulé: Paris, pp. 45-46.

Emile Saladin, "The Fandango" (1834)

This poem describes the fandango being danced in a club or ball – a dance, it should be noted, still of dubious legality when this was published (along with the cancan and cachuca, see Rêvenance No. 5) which gives the piece a political edge that isn't apparent anymore. The poem emphasizes exactly the reason for the prohibition: the unrestrained sexuality that was practiced in dance halls and to which the dance gave expression. The Fandango had recently been imported from Spain, and was danced both by touring professional troupes and by hardcore Parisian dance-freaks (known as chicards, débordeurs, badouillards, etc.) at balls and dance clubs. It's Spanish origins were also in large part Arabic and Muslim origins, a heritage which Saladin emphasizes and attempts to celebrate in this poem.

   

It's an interesting and very musical poem by a very interesting poet who I'm very ambivalent about – and who does not seem to have been published or written about in any language since 1845. This intro's a bit long so feel free ton skip to the poem if/when you wish.

   

First the problematic aspects: orientalism and a heavy dose of the male gaze. A big focus of the poem (and part of what made his work in general difficult to publish) is the unrestrained sexuality that permeated underground dance culture, but almost inevitably given the time, it's a pretty unreflectively misogynist perspective of it. As so often in French Romanticism (cf. Delacroix) this is tied to an equally unrestrained appropriative Orientalism treating Andalusia (Muslim Spain) as a kind of wonderland for the European imagination. In fact its author, the obscure avant-garde poet Emile Saladin, seems on the basis of his seven surviving poems to have been one of the most fanatical and dedicated proponents of the self-declared "Orientalist" current within French Romanticism.

  

I have no intention of clearing him on any of the above charges, but he's complicated in other ways too. First, my sense is that despite all the problematic aspects of his orientalism (which seem obvious to us now, 190 years later, but would not have occurred to most Europeans a century after his time) I get the sense from all his work that he meant well, in his own head at least – that he was attempting to celebrate cultural difference; the centrality of these themes, as well as references to multiple non-European cultures at a time when such things were still difficult to track down, make this seem like more than a fashion (by 1860, that would be different) while there is a complete absence in his work of the degrading stereotypes available to him from mainstream French culture – barbarity, rapacity, greed, tyranny, dogmatism, etc. Sensuality, though equally problematic as a stereotype, is clearly a positive trait in his eyes. 

  

His poetry is so steeped in Orientalism that I had assumed his name was a pseudonym – but more interestingly, it is not. His family name of Saladin apparently derives from the Crusades, which while clearly an issue from the colonialist side of things raises the question (I hate to say this but...) of Templar history? There was another French Saladin family, possibly another branch of his own, who were prominent engineers for three generations after him, and all also orientalist scholars, explorers, and diplomats; so the tantalizing question is raised of whether he in fact grew up in a family micro-culture of relative or aspirationally multicultural nature.... 

  

Saladin was also a radical leftist, described in the only biographical notice I've found (written during his life) as a "democratic poet" which in our parlance would translate roughly to a proto-anarchist insistence on direct rather than representative democracy. In the early 1840s his poetic activity gave way to journalism, and the newspaper he co-edited published work by Fourierist-associated writers, raising the possibility that his emphasis on sensuality may have its roots in radical political theory. 

  

He's also an example of provincial Romanticism – he seems to have been based in Bordeaux throughout his career, and thus represents the less-spoken of Romanticist and underground communities outside of Paris, connected by networks of correspondence, and traded journals. He is also part of the smaller network of extremist/avant-garde writers pushing the more formally and thematically eccentric aspects of the movement into experimental territory. As the single notice referred to above notes, his poetry is "very difficult", partly through its often short lines which destabalize the metric structure of French verse (long story...) and which derive from Troubadour poetry which is in turn inflected by Muslim forms from Spain, partly because of the heavy interior sound-patterning which further destabilizes the metric effects while paradoxically creating an intensely rhythmic, musical effect, and finally the often fractured and fragmentary syntax and occasionally bizarre imagery. Not easy to translate! This poem appeared in the avant-leaning anthology Annales romantiques in 1834, one of the first books I bought for the Revenant Archive.

 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE FANDANGO
-Emile Saladin

Dance on! ô youthful girls!
Dance onward, youthful gents!
To your jubilant quadrilles
unite inviting trills;
Dance on, dance on, coquettes,
to pleasure ripened yet;
to din of castanets
may all your songs be wedded.

What bayadere’s[1] physiques!
And so divinely smiling!
As if each one was easy,
all these flirtatious Genies!
Do you perceive them, pining,
upon the fields verdant,
those Andalusians fervent,
to glide off, tawny Virgins…

Tis those of grenadines,[2]
of billowing bouquets,
of sugarcane in wreathes,
with such seductive moves;
of Andalusian blooms
so ravishing that Asia’s
poetry offers us
no thing as marvelous.

Detached indifferent
on pale naked necks,
their heads are gently bent,
and heaving are their breasts;
all humming with the rhythm,
all rush to take position,
the next fandango’s launched,
its surges and its vaults.

Ephemeral and sprightly,
you sylphs, as you are flying,
in your light-hearted stances,
evoke a love expiring.
Now just like supple branches,
you’re thrusting out your hips
As well as throats so pallid
from which the eye can sip.

What frisky merriment!
What eyes so dark and rending!
Now, alabaster and jet
are fluttering and blending.
Now how their skin is reddening,
their lissome waists are bending,
their breath is like perfumes,
and every sense confused!

O! You pearls of Spain,
how well you entertain,
beneath the flowering olive,
as you cavort and frolic;
to see you as you twist,
your sweaty bodies slick,
revealing as you leap,
til sapped, you take your seat.

Then, see the ball jam-packed,
complexions bright and burning,
when enervated dancers
back to their seats are dragged:
the Madonna out of view,
there, many a voice is purring,
and safe behind the fans
set amorous rendez-vous.

Go, you youthful band,
Go, and laugh forever;
this is the Age to gather
your blissful days and pleasures;
while life is acrobatic,
and on your roofs of clay
so frail and prone to stray
abide thee with the passions.

How fair it is my sweet ones,
in Alhambra far to spy
the myriad Moorish spires
dismembered by the seasons;
with grace they play and run
where multitudes of races
have printed fleeting traces
devoured by the sun.

Hard by Xenaralife[3]
engulfed in rushing breezes,
Caliph’s strongholds ancient
so doted on in dreaming;
hard by such fine dominions
and in the bracing shade
that Abyssinians
grant sanctuary in.

Dance on! ô youthful girls!
Dance onward, youthful gents!
To your jubilant quadrilles
unite inviting trills;
Dance on, dance on, coquettes,
to pleasure ripened yet;
to din of castanets
may all your songs be wedded.
 
          – trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
 

NOTES:

[1] Bayaderes: Hindu religious dancers. This reference reflects the intense interest in Hinduism then burgeoning within French Romanticism, as evidenced also by Auguste Bouzenot\’s description of the Hindu Durga Puja festival that was published in the same issue of the Annales romanrtiques anthology as this poem. Though Saladin’s Orientalism was focused on the Islamic world, he indicates here his engagement with a broad range of non-Western cultures – in both cases problematically promulgating the association with sexuality common in European colonial portrayals.

[2] “grenadines”: possible pun on “grenadine” as a loose silk garment. 

[3] Seems to be an archaic designation for the labyrinthine garden or park of Alhambra; see the 1833 description in an Orientalist novel serialized in the Romanticist Revue de Paris, which is likely to have influenced Saladin’s evocation: Le Duchesse Abrantès, “Hernandes.” Revue de Paris, Tome Quarante Sixième. Paris: 1833.

A 19th century phonetic poem & Frenetic Romanticist radical fiction from 1833!

Here's an excerpt from the novel "The Cunning of Trialph" by Charles Lassailly, one of the leading proponents of experimental neo-gothic Frenetic Romanticism. I've got three sections here:
  

1.) The text from the book's frontispiece, which needs to be considered an integral part of the novel; it includes another example of Romanticist sound poetry, not included in the mOnocle-Lash chapbook (though I may need to do a second edition...). It is arranged concretely in the form of a centered pyramid, and as you see is framed as a nihilist "profession of faith".
Interesting to note first that there are some other examples of phonetic/onomatopoeic epigraphs by Borel, Janin, and others, that I'm now considering part of this early micro-tradition, and furthermore that all of these examples of Romanticist sound poetry, including the epigraphs, come from specifically the Frenetic sub-current of the movement...
  

2.) The first section of the long preface, an unrelenting example of frenetic romanticism. The Preface was the Romanticist version of what the modernists would call a manifesto, and this is one of the most fully-developed manifestos of frenetic romanticism. Yes, this is the very beginning of the manifesto; in medias res.

   

3) Chapters 8 and 9 of the novel; these sections don't delve into the horror aspect of the movement as much as the radical political side of it. Lassailly's acidic satire is applied here to himself and his own community, and gives a cynical yet whimsical insiders-look into the radical political scene, focused on the Polish anti-imperialism movement which was one of the galvinizing issues for French liberals at the time. He was closely allied with the Jeunes-France Bouzingo group, and the conversation in Chapter 9 bears striking similarities to conversations at ultra-Romanticist "orgies" (think party+happening) recorded in O'Neddy's 'Pandemonium' and Gautier's 'The Bowl of Punch'. (a number of Frenetic Romanticists were technically medical students and thus possible candidates for the character here, including Gérard de Nerval and Hector Berlioz). 

There's some play with spacing and formatting that gets lost in this format; you'll have to wait for the eventual anthology of Frenetic Romanticism for which this is destined. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#1 TITLE PAGE:

[from Title Page]:
The 

Cunning
of
Trialph,
Our Contemporary Before his Suicide

  

  

Ah?
Eh! hey?
Hee! hee! hee!
Oh!
Hou! hou! hou! hou! hou!
– Profession of Faith by the author –

   

   

#2 FROM THE PREFACE

– Where are you going?
– I’m going to see death . . . While waiting, I’m fending off boredom by fashioning myself a book, of which my suicide will be the climax.
– On your word of honour, my dear despair, you’ll have the courage to play this tragic prank?
– Sure.
– Damn! the opus will sell itself . . . You’ve got debts?
– You better believe it.

–––

Even if I do desire to disabuse myself of living much longer, I’m nonetheless still more or less young. My head’s been plucked clean by the blasts of furious storms, but nowadays I prefer a bald skull: this makes you a philosopher in the eyes of our dancers, at a ball. And listen here, I still have more teeth on my mandibles than in the hollowed-out maw of certain cadavers. Then too, I swipe cigarettes from all my friends, and bouquets of violets from all my mistresses!
But, for example, among other things, I’ve ended up wearing myself ragged committing adulterous jokes, without consequence; and, constituted as I am to seek diversion at all costs, even to the point of crime, I set to work on two or three assassinations, without question solely to pass the time, and for the honour of the Gall system,[1] according to the lumps that a med student could most likely demonstrate upon the occiput of my skull.
Hence, today, I’m fleeing the justice of the community of men; and I’m rolling, seated in the carriage of a Stagecoach, toward the sea, where I’m headed to drown myself. You’re quite aware that I look down on the horrors of the Morgue in Paris, and that it’s more decent to extinguish myself in the midsts of the Ocean’s abysses, where nothingness shall clutch my bones.

–––

Right from the start I’m going to confess one thing to you, because I know how you love prefaces.
This one wouldn’t have a title: such are words or ideas which possess a mediocre value; but the money wouldn’t be minted with any effigy.
– Why? . . . –
Ask my century which the materialists of the French revolution have guillotined. For the head of humanity, it’s an idea: God!
Laugh it up then.
It’s your occupation to laugh ever since somebody rhymed the Virgin.[2] But transform into consequences.
You say: I am liberal, republican or carlist;[3] I’m thinking about the country, I desire the well-being of all . . .
Me, I respond: You are proper names; you never think about anything; you desire to live in order to live! . . .
Back to what I was saying. You are the frigid limbs of a cadaver. What you call Order or Liberty, it’s electrical stimulation. Flinch, you frogs!
In your disorganised society,[4] there need be no link between a cause and an effect, and forgetting to enter, hats off, into the logic of facts, you never wrap your head around anything but melodramas.
There are your slogans! There are your cartoons in silhouette! All of your literature, all of your political, moral and religious legislation, would rival one box of prints, along with a portfolio of sketches. Here: I’ve made this for you whilst my genius was sound asleep, the one that comes from on high!
  
 
NOTES TO PREFACE:
[1] Franz joseph Gall was among the first researchers to identify various functional centres within the brain, inadvbertently establishing the groundwork for phrenology.
[2] Pucelle. Possibly referring to Voltaire’s or Schiller’s works aboUT Joan of Arc, both titled La Pucelle ‘Orleans.
[3] Liberal: support Constitutional monarchy, civil liberties, and a Free Market; Republican: support representative democracy; Carlist: Support an absolute monarchy and return to theocratic feudalism.
[4] The charge of the “disorganised” state of nascent Capitalism echoes the vocabulary of socialist discourse of the time.

 

#3 CHAPTERS 8-9
   
 

VIII

  
In the evening, it occurred to us to crack open a bottle of champagne, and a brilliant feast in honour of a people who had died for liberty. . . .
Moreover I’ll assert it explicitly in this story, numerous toasts were proposed. The banquet’s most distinguished members (there were deputies!) distilled, phrase by phrase, word by word, things perfumed with a peculiar charm. A lyre player sang tear to eye, couplets of a disorienting mind, which he recalled in his first vaudeville. A philanthropic subscription was voted on unanimously for an imminent ball, where one would find lovely women, charitable magicians who dance with crowns of flowers, necklaces of gemstones, and nude shoulders. To wrap up, the revelers drank in a manner altogether edifying to patriotism.
Ernest and I, we behaved ourselves in order to deserve graciously, along with the others, our citizens’ esteem and the recognition of the Polish, who were being assailed day and night, worn out by fatigue, starvation and thirst, under a hail of balls,[1] in the midst of their brothers’ cadavers. . . . . .
The hour having arrived, a fashionable youth, an contraversial opposition journalist, offered, we being his two neighbours, to smoke us up on some dried opium leaves and tablets from Constantinople in an exquisite chibouk which had been gifted to him, in the course of his journeys in Asia, by the beautiful vizieress,[2] who is the favourite mistress of the Great Sultan.
We couldn’t turn him down, not without too many regrets, this virtuous republican.
 
  

IX

  
I no longer recall what went down in this unorthodox orgy, apart from fantasizing about a conspiracy which was taken up initially by those who were drunkest.
One shouted out:
– I have a glorious plan in mind! . . .
Another:
– We shall avenge France!
Several of them:
–It must begin by doing away with the tyrant!
All together:
–I’m on board.
– Who’s going to kill him?
– Me!
– Me!
– Me!
– We’ll kill him for sure!
– I volunteer myself to prick him with a pin sharpened with prussic acid, by giving him a shake of the hand, as he’s generous with it to the vile henchmen who tramp out to greet his horse.
– This joke of a med student has spirit.
– I cede my invention to you, if you like.
– When shall you take action?
– I’d much rather suffer on foot no more: never would I make my escape successfully . . . . .
Here, there was a moment of silence . . .
I wanted to change the subject, and I howled vigorously in my turn:
–Friends of joy, which among you would lend me, just for this one night, one of his mistresses? I’d come pay her one visit, with no consequences for the future.
A handsome student on the right, fashionably rigged out in his cravat and his vest like a corset, turned to me:
– I have for some time had at my disposition the friendship of a young patriot who’s going to marry an old man, her benefactor, whom she detests for his opinions; but I confess that I promised her a dress two months ago; and my respectable father insists that I should be forced to eat cabbage soup with the family, quite simply because one semester I squandered six hundred francs on red and black[3] . . . . .
Ernest seemed to wake up in order to remark to me:
– Are you really clinging to procuring indecent distractions? The day before yesterday, at the Opera, I procured the fantasy of several murderous winks in the hall . . . . I lost no time, and captivated one downstage . . . The lover that I’d come to take to the bird-hunt, in her turn, kept busy by making her dark gaze work to perfection . . . I gave myself up to dazzling her a bit, by blowing her several teasing kisses . . . . . She tugged off her glove; and as my modesty would scarcely permit me to perceive the favourable implications of these responses from afar, I drew nearer with so much indifference . . .
– Listen up, citizens, let’s listen.
– Ah well! it seems that despite myself I’ve totally revolutionized her . . . her glove fell at my feet . . .
I became irritated with Ernest.
– What’s all this supposed to prove?
– I picked it up and handed it to her . . .
With that, Ernest scanned the group with shifty eyes :
Gentlemen, I drink to the virtue of your wives! but could a woman that you respect be named? . . .
– No, no, no!
– As I was saying . . . I handed her glove to her: it was a pretext for thanking me and blushing with modesty . . .She took advantage of it . . . As for me, I too took advantage of a trifling situation . . . For it just so happened that my name and address found themselves slipped beneath her fingers; and she didn’t write too badly, to reproach people for their impertinence, by inviting them to no doubt earn their pardon, at Rue Caumartin, No. 7, signed: mademoiselle Césarine B.
– Ah! ah! ah! ah!
– The century’s so corrupt!
– Long live the republic! . . .
– Is his story history?[4]
I took the ladle from the bowl of punch, and helped myself twice, up to the brim of my enormous glass.
Ernest tapped me on the shoulder:
– Crazy artist that you are, do you want to present yourself in my place? . .
– I renounce your protection for the moment.
– My boy’s got his whims.
– I’d rather be conspiring here . . . . .
One of these drunkards lifted up his head:
– And if the affair were serious?
Another tugged out a dagger hidden beneath his shirt:
– And if he only took action for nothing less than resuscitating liberty with one human life? . . .
– That would depend specifically, gentlemen, on the manner in which patriotism would do things. For a hundred thousand francs in annuity, I would massacre the tyrant should he be the most courageous man in the world; . . for a hundred thousand francs of annuity and dictatorship, how I would forget! . . . . Furthermore, gentlemen, I’m a terrible joker, of which you’ve no need . . .
My hasty departure made no impression on them; they still had drinking to do.
 
  

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8-9

[1] A dark pun: the refugees persist in their misery in the midst of a hail of “charity balls” from the privileged and middle classes, which are not effective in stopping the hail of “lead balls” or bullets suppressing their relatives at home.
  
[2] Visir, an archaic alternate form of Vizir. That government position was always held by a male; it is unclear whether whether Lassailly is confused here about the foreign term’s meaning, or is attempting a feminization of vizir to designate the Vizier’s primary wife; I’ve opted for the latter.
  
[3] Not the book by Stendhal, but the gambling game of this name.
  
[4] In the French, the same word serves for “story” and “history”, hence the(virtual) pun: L’histoire est-il historique?
    
 
 
from Charles Lassailly, Les Roueries de Trialph, notres contemporain avant son suicide. 1833. Silvestre: Paris.

Théophile Gautier, "Sonnet VII" (1830)

Gautier played a central role in underground, experimental culture for over 40 years, and his influence on the literary avant-garde was both profound and problematic – so much that he was almost systematically erased from the avant-garde 's collective consciousness by the Surrealists. Yet he is ignored to our peril. The problem: he has been enshrined (especially in anglophone criticism) as the father of de-politicized, “Art for Art's Sake” (a term he tossed out when describing what he called the 'cult of art' in his massively influential Preface to Mlle. de Maupin). Gautier truly does have much to answer for here – in retrospect, we can see how he set a politically distanced pattern that was not shaken free of until the Modernists. However, when read carefully and outside of Walter Pater's critical shadow, even his famous Preface turns out much more nuanced and complex, if still flawed. I would propose (some other time) that the vision he proposes there is as close to Hakim Bey's Ontological Anarchy as Pater's Art for Art's Sake. In fact, he specifically espouses Fourierist socialism in that tract, giving the very same reasons that the Surrealists and Situationists would later offer. What he renounces is his belief in the “political” electoral plane as an effective vehicle for change. This poem from his 1st collection, is explicitly political and calls out the current "Liberal Monarchy" that took over after the July Revolution of 1830, the year of publication, and its suppression of multiple democratic uprisings in its wake. Four years later, in the Maupin Preface, he echoed the poem's point: “What matters it whether 'tis a sword, a holy-water sprinkler, or an [bourgeois-republican] umbrella that rules you? It's a stick all the same... it would be far more progressive... to break it and throw away the pieces.” In experimental fashion, even his syntax fractures here, along with his faith in positivist revolution.

    

Sonnet VII (1830)

by Théophile Gautier

 

Liberty of July! Woman of bust divine,

And whose body ends in a tail!

Gérard de Nerval

  

And this blind life of theirs is so debased,

They envious are of every other fate.

Inferno, canto III

  

With this disgraceful age tis high time that we break it;

The fatal finger placed upon its brow condemned¹

As upon hell’s gates: Hope depleted! – Friends,

Enemies, public, kings, all trump us taken in.

A budget elephant sucks gold by trunk taken in;

In their thrones yet a-quake from yesterday’s ascents,

From kinsmen overthrown they keep all, but rescind

The palm prompt with gifts and pomp breathtaking.

  

And yet in July, neath the sky’s indigo,

There where the cobbles lurched,² they proffered promises

Equal to Charles tenth’s overseen masses!

  

Alone, Poetry manifest in Hugo

Refused deluding us, of which palms divine

Enshadow our debris, destiny inclined.
  

– Trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
  

from Théophile Gautier, Poésies Complètes, Tome premier. 1884. Charpentier: Paris. p.107.
  

1 In the original, this line ends with a mis, “placed”, which is an exact homophone of amis, “friends”, in the next line. I have found it impossible to translate this wordplay.

2 Referring to the paving-stones of Paris being pried up to build barricades, a potent symbol of revolution in France throughout the 19th Century.