Jules Laforgue Selected Poems [Paperback]

Jules Laforgue (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1984

Deeply nihilistic yet full of yearning, tender yet savagely self-mocking, Laforgue has a unique voice and vision that nonetheless mark him out as one of the founding fathers of modernism. Like Charles Baudelaire before him, he was determined to face up to the ugly and decadent as well as the conventionally poetic aspects of himself and the world about him. In a career that rivals Arthur Rimbaud's for its tragically brief, accelerated development, he pioneered the use of coarse colloquialism, startling rhymes, and astonishing invented words. His greatest achievement, the posthumous Derniers Vers (1890), was the first complete French volume of free verse. Partly influenced by his translation of Walt Whitman -- the first in the French language -- Derniers Vets is brilliantly effective in capturing the truth of fleeting impressions and inner sensations. It is also, writes Graham Dunstan Martin, "one of the musical masterpieces of literature." This bilingual edition features a generous selection of poems in the original French from Laforgue's Le Sanglot de la Terre, Les Complaintes, L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonte, and Derniers Vers, with running prose translations at the bottom of each page.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Apotheosis
The Bats
The Cigarette
The Coming Winter
Foreword
Funeral March For The Death Of The Earth
Good Old Autumn
Hypertrophy
The Impossible
Inexhaustibly
Litanies Of The First Quarter Moons
Locutions Des Pierrots, Sels.
Pierrots (one Has Principles)
Second Lament Of Lord Pierrot
Severities Without Equal
Sneerenade To The Sun
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Cornerstone Pr (June 1984)
• ISBN-10: 0918476100
• ISBN-13: 978-0918476104
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,421,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clowns, Moons, and Youth!, May 21, 2004

By 

Christopher Nelson (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Jules Laforgue was a contemporary of Rimbaud, yet they never knew one another because just as Rimbaud had stopped writing poetry and was leaving for Abyssinia, Laforgue was arriving in Paris from South America (where he was born). There is some debate over who really wrote the first "free verse", as Rimbaud had already written his "Illuminations", however Laforgue was the first to actually have his vers libres published. And so, his influence on modern English poetry through Eliot, and Crane was established.

Where Rimbaud is "harsh", and "brusque", Laforgue is subtle and melancholy. The former is more the visionary, whereas Laforgue seems to me more the dreamer/imaginary. Either-way, Laforgue is wonderful to read, and a nice change of pace from Rimbaud. Even though he wrote more than Rimbaud, his life was shorter - he died of tuberculosis at 27! The translations in this Penguin edition by Graham Dunstin Martin are literal, and so the poetic affect is limited unless you are able to read a little of the French (printed right above the translations in more prominent print). For verse translations, I highly recommend William Jay Smith ("Selected Readings of Jules Laforgue", 1956.)

I have yet to read all of Laforgue's works (there are the "Moral Tales", and essays on "Berlin", art, and landscapes), but my overall impression of his five books of poems presented here is of seemingly schizophrenic conversations with the moon, clowns, and inanimate objects like cigarettes, pianos, and buildings. His imagery is incredible ("skeletons of wisteria", "stewpot, poor Earth!", "heart of gold stuffed with literary spices", "brain pickled in the alchohol of pride") and the French rhymes magnificently musical. Laforgue is playful, melancholy, and pessimistic using an attractive poetic style. Both Rimbaud and Laforgue are princes of modernity, following up on the Master, Baudelaire's dark revolution against and away from romanticsm. Laforgue captures fleeting sensations and moments more playfully than Rimbaud, I think, using more colloquial language than his peer, but Rimbaud is second to none for obscure visions and acerbic wit. All in all, Laforgue's poems will make you smile at times in their innocence and lunacy, but most importantly, they are a conversation with various muses (lunar, pierrot, the feminine, amor, etc.) which are inspiring, thought-provoking, and astonishing all at once.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling verse from the father of modern poetry., February 23, 2000

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Jules LaForgue, for so long underrecognised in his own country, is now seen as the father of modern poetry, especially influential on the work of Eliot and Pound in terms of persona, language, reaction to modernity, and the violent incongruity of his metaphors and images.

This edition boasts excellent prose translations of the poems by Graham Dunstan Martin. These may be insufficient for the non-French speaker, but the problem with translations that try to catch the spirit of the original rather than the detail, such as Ron Padgett's translations of Blaise Cendrars, is that necessary omissions can lead to dilution and distortion. So, I suppose, this book is best recommended for those, like myself, who have a smidgeon of mediocre French, and can compare their own efforts against Martin's grammatically correct translations.

His introduction is refreshingly free of jargon, and with great simplicity, he details LaForgue's tragically early life, his intellectual precusors, his cultural milieu, his themes and his methods. LaForgue's poetic skill often has to transcend the essential banality of his philosophy, and Martin's discussion of LaForgue's pervasive irony seems to suggest that his work is often about nothing at all if every comment, even if it's 'ironic' is ironically cancelled out by irony (oh yes).

The first selection of which I've just read is largely juvenelia entitled 'The Grief Of the Earth'. Martin warns of the young LaForgue's vulnerablility to Hugo's influence, based on considerable rhetorical bombast, and these poems aren't free of railing against God, the weather, 'ordinary' people, the world, the Unconscious.

But even this early in his oeuvre, LaForgue shows remarkable brilliance. He uses conventional forms, such as the sonnet or lyric, but rends their frames with the exciting violence of his vocabulary, the unnerving juxtapositional clashes he achieves. His poems often start out as one thing, offering a certain set of emotions, which, through irony, and exagerration, become something totally different, more disturbing. The 'Lament of the Notre-Dame organist' is a case in point. The hero begins grieving movingly for his dying lover, but he gets so carried away by his grand sentiments, that he thinks her already dead, and savours the lashing he'll give to the Almighty, and the eternal doleful Bach fugues he'll play. A pitiable, Romantic, lover has become something much more modern and disturbing.

It's not all violence though. There is a lovely debate between a clown and Jesus over the paradox of free-will and God's omniscience; a strange lament by lonely Parisians for the superficial, but gay and alive, high society that has abandoned them during winter; a danse macabre by a grotesque infant whose mother calls him beyond the grave; and a mellow, despairing tribute to poetry, cigarettes and dreams as escapes from the living death that is our existence. I can't wait to try LaForgue's more mature work.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Startling juvenelia from the father of modernist poetry., February 14, 2000

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Martin's introduction is so jargon-free that it almost feels unscholarly. However, he manages to essay economically LaForgue's biography, his times, ideas, personality, themes, development, method and their demonstration in his work. Sometimes this can be a little simplistic, at others a little confusing. For example, Martin discusses at great length LaForgue's irony. This is fair enough, it is an important weopon in any writer's arsenal, especially one so phlegmatically iconoclastic as LeForgue.

However, whenever Martin decides what LeForgue's theme is, or whenever he does something a little gauche, he negates with irony. If everything LeForgue says is ironical, even the irony, than he's not really saying anything, is he? Better is his analysis of LeForgue's immense influence on modern poetry, especially on Pound and Eliot. His sensibly chosen examples show how indebted Prufrock and Other Poems was to LaForgue, in the persona developed, the language used, and the startling, non-conventional effects of clashing images and metaphors.

I have just read LaForgue's first works, Le Sanglot De La Terre (the grief of the earth). This is essentially his juvenelia, and Martin warns of his indebtedness to Hugo, his youthful pomposity and arrogance. This may be true, but if you're used to timid English poetry, even adolescent stuff like this is astonishing. LaForgue is most famous for developing the first French free verse style, but in these poems he adopts conventional forms. However, these burst with such violence, his words are barely containable ravages at decorum, his daring is so wildly out of proportion that one cannot fail to be excited.

Some of these poems are extraordinary. In one a church organist laments his dying lover. So carried away is he with his sorrow that he dreams already of her death and the immense grieving he is going to offer. In another he extols the escapist pleasures of narcotics as an antidote to the living death that is life. There are wailings against God, the elements, fate, the Unconscious. One lovely poem frames a debate between Jesus and a clown over free will and God's omniscience, with the former fudging the matter.

But there are also quieter, more gently melancholic poems, such as the lament of the Parisian poor for the gay bright aristocracy, whose winter absence makes the city seem desolate, and yet whose transformative power is also a kind of death. These are so good I cannot wait to try LaForgue's more mature work.