"SLEEP ! - Gray Wolf-Mannaro! Smoke-black sleep!
SLEEP! Wolf of velvet, of fragrant lace!
Kiss of the stranger, and kiss of the Beloved!
SLEEP! Night thief! Ecstatic madness-brevity!
Perfume rising to the sky from fragrant graves!
Cinderella carriage collecting the Weasels!
Obscene confessor of devout birth-death!
You who come, like a dog, to lick the old sore.
Of the martyr whom death tugs on the lattice!
O forced smile of the stifled crisis!
SLEEP! Tradewinds breeze! Breath of dawn!
[...]
SLEEP! - Star torched chameleon!
Phantom-vessel wandering lonely at full speed!
Dating woman, wrapping herself in a veil!
SLEEP! Sad spider, spread your web over me!
[...]”
(from Litanie du Sommeil - Litany of Sleep)
“An Ankou,” specter of death, young Edouard Joachim Corbière was called by the inhabitants of Roscoff. Skinny, disfigured by rheumatism, a lost air of a cursed dandy, boots and hat pulled down over his face dominated by a long aquiline nose: this is how he presented himself wandering the Breton coast. King of poetry and jester, eccentric, baroque, excessive, rebel, anarchist. All this and much more was this Breton poet, one of the most important and original of the entire nineteenth century.
The list of his rebellions and eccentric behaviors goes on and on: from parading with a forcible chain around his ankles through the streets of that Roscoff in which he used to spend the summer months, to sleeping in hammocks instead of beds, to keeping a toad nailed to desiccate on the mantelpiece of his own abode.
Plebeian dandy, aristocratic punk, king of contradiction and mockery. Inconsistency that unravels over the course of his stormy existence, marked by defiance of his parents, on whom he nevertheless depends financially to pay for his vices, trips to Italy and Parisian sojourns.
He calls himself a painter (and pictorial frescoes are his poems) and in Montmartre hangs out with brush artists while snubbing poets. He fancies himself a sailor, though he does not possess the temperament or the physique. He dreams of surpassing his father, author of a novel with maritime tints - Le Négrier - incensed by the critics, but toward him he displays all his masochism, showing him his own failures in school, animated by a self-destructive drive that permeates him in every relationship (starting from the one with his mother to the love triangle he baked with Arminda-Josephine Cucchiani, buxom and vulgar actress of Italian descent, and her lover, Count Rodolphe de Battine, who watched with amusement the young Corbière's unrequited amorous approaches) and that runs throughout his lyrics.
We are talking about the life of this artist anyway, because never before have life and poetry intertwined.
He chose the pseudonym of Tristan, Isolde's famous lover.
Les Amours Jaunes - The Yellow Loves - came out in 1873, entirely financed by his father. This is the only poetic work given birth by Corbière. And it is also an immense autobiographical confession, filled with meaning and anticipation in stylistic choices, a very long journey through life... and death.
The intertwining of themes, the many facets and planes through which it can be analyzed are likely to stun.
“Yellow” loves because yellow is a sick color, as shabby is the existence perpetually recalled from the grave; but yellow is also a bitter color, the color of betrayal, of the unattainable woman-torment Marcella, a figure who permeates the entire collection.
Irony and facetiousness accompany the self-destruction of man and society, the festering of relationships and values, and gradually the color changes.
The jester who recites and parodies, who dismantles any poetic scheme or pre-established social order, ends up spreading a funereal veil over his own face and the world. The smile becomes a fixed mask that grows wider and wider.
Emblematic in this path are the lyrics that open and close the collection, two parodies of La Fontane's The Poet and the Cicada; in the difference in tones, the path of Corbière and the entire collection is evident: the first version goliardic, the second disillusioned.
"The poet after singing,
Disassembled,
He saw his Muse, practically drunk,
Rolling downward from its cloud
Cardboard, on the shreds
Of paper and rags.
He went to paste his face
On the neighbor's windows,
To make an apology
D’aver fatto – Oh non di proposito! -
That monstrous abomination of a book!...
- But: were you therefore very intoxicated?
- Drunk with you!...what's wrong with that?
- Trivial public writer!
That he could so well say it...
And, don't write it so well!
- I thought about it, getting back...
You are never perfect, Marcella.
- Oh! - that's it, like, she says,
Decanted, now!"
(La Cigale e le Poète - The Cicada and the Poet, version that closes the collection)
Of fundamental importance is the style employed by Corbiére: his rebellion (and it could only be so) is also directed against poetry and the dominant poetic institutions, the sterile academic dogmas that do so much damage to the poetic universe.
Anticipating all the twentieth-century (pseudo)avant-gardes, be they called futurism or Dadaism, drawing in part on the teachings of Mallarmé, he insists on an atypical use of punctuation and graphic symbols, to break up the text, to make it syncopated, antilithic.
This is his affront and simultaneously his act of love toward poetry: to make it anti-musical (thus opposing a sharp departure from Mallarminian and Symbolist poetics). In love with folk songs and bawdy sailor stories, he coats the poem in plebeian, low-key song tones, employing a colloquial style, blending neologisms with seafaring and dialect terms, emphasizing and privileging the oral aspect over the written one.
He, who was not a sailor and could never have been, finds through speech a redemption, the realization of an ideal, his own weapon with which to fight the world.
He, the eternal forerunner, born in a seventeenth-century mansion, died of arthritis and consumption on March 1, 1875, in Morlaix at the age of thirty, before those who gave birth to him.
He, the forerunner, begins to find public recognition ten years after his death thanks to Verlaine, first in the journal Lutèce and then through inclusion in the celebrated anthology on the cursed poets.
"I saw the sun hard against the wisps
Dueling. - I saw two blades shining,
Two blades that made funny parries
Blackbirds clad in black watching them shine.
A gentleman in a shirt was rolling up his sleeve;
White, it looked like a big camellia to me;
Another pink flower was on the branch,
Pink like-and then a foil tilted.
– Vedo rosso… Ah si! è giusto: ci si squarta -
... a white camellia - there - like his throat ...
A yellow camellia, - here - all spotted...
Deceased love, fallen on my eyelet.
- To me, unveiled plague and spring flower!
Living camellia, mottled with blood!"
(Duel aux Camélias - Duel of the Camellias)
Special edited by Ian
