"Delahaye inventor of several unpublished poems of Rimbaud?" By David Ducoffre Part
In the book Steve Murphy Rimbaud and the Commune published in 2010, a footnote on page attracts attention. In an article on the poem Squats, the author discusses the problem of verses attributed to Rimbaud and testimonies by Delahaye. To believe it, Rimbaud had devoted one of its "ultra-comic poems" to a caretaker of the college of Charleville. And Delahaye to quote two lines from memory:
Behind bounced into grotesque gasps,
A Rose swallowed in the belly of the doorman ...
Kudos! The look of these worms is actually Rimbaud, not only by their obscenity and choice of words that are found in The Heart stolen, First Communions and others ("hiccups", "grotesque , "," porter ", ...). What syntax! The merger with Squats of course, except that the reconstructions of memory Delahaye prompted criticism Rimbaldian some caution. However, Steve Murphy said in footnote 3, which straddles the pages 322 and 323 of his study: "[...] original research of David Ducoffre, we do not know when to publish the first draft of this chapter, offer incentives for taking arguments seriously these reconstructions. "
remember what the reconstructions of memory proposed by Delahaye. Most of them are in his book Memories familiar published in 1925. But the original publication was made in several issues of the journal Ardennes and Argonne from 1907 to 1909 under the title: "About Rimbaud. Familiar memories. "In 1907, Delahaye cites a verse novel that actually sounds like Rimbaud:" At the foot of the dark walls, beating the skinny dogs ... "It would be the memory of a" ; initial production [...] unfortunately lost "when Rimbaud showed" pupil a fiery boléiste: Aristes Lhéritier. Without defining the word "boléiste" that would apply to a student rather win the top prizes, Delahaye said that his friend poet then exhibited "satire imitated from lectern, where he started in humor violent should give us the latest A music and The Seated . "In 1908, the harvest of Delahaye is richer still. Besides the two verses quoted above, he claims to have the memory of a poem which he states that the title: Carnival of Statues, and a composition which he manages to return the subject and the first and last verse. It would be the "intensely passionate romance - very condensed, twenty or thirty lines at most - some Andromache in a worse situation, [it has] forgotten the title, but retained the first and last sentence that summarize the meaning "
Brown, she was sixteen when she was married
[...]
For she loves her son with love seventeen years.
And in a footnote on the page, Delahaye confronts the evocation of these two poems lost in the discovery of unpublished manuscripts by Forain entrusted to Millanvoye: "They may find themselves, as the evidence submitted last year by George Maurevert: the Customs, the Sisters of Charity , speaks with enthusiasm Verlaine, and many beautiful poems in prose, what our brave René Aubert published in its Book Review of Paris and Champagne . "
And now, again in 1908, Delahaye continues to impress us. He cites another unpublished text, and this time around. These eight verses that Rimbaud would have transcribed after terrible Year (June 71) to the inside of a church bell from Mezieres. Delahaye How can he have the memory intact of these eight lines (octave or two quatrains), and incorrectly calling them a "Nostradamus prophecy? That is incomprehensible. It seems rather a text that mentions casually that he had under his eyes. These worms are also not bad: comparison felt good the first two verses, clever formulation prosodic on a date to 3, 4 and earthiness to the remarkable rhythmic swaying of the four last lines up with the idea of a little bell ladle.
Oh! if the bells are bronze
Our hearts are full of despair!
In June, eighteen hundred and seventy-one,
be assassinated by a black
We Jean Baudry, Jean us Baluch,
Having done our wishes,
Mourûmes steeple in ladle
Desdouets an abomination! ...
And still in 1908, Delahaye delivers the very beginning (three verses) from another unpublished poem The Complaint and grocers, according to him, almost an entire poem into quintiles for in drafting the North-East ! We will return later to these two quotes outstanding, contemporary addition to the previous stanza.
once again stated that in a letter dated 25 July 1924 Marcel Coulon, who then announced a discovery (it will be the poem What the Poet about flowers ), Delahaye again claims to cite several unpublished poem of a lost, a Letter to Loulou, "a fun thing that Verlaine had, as he recalls the rhymes in the Coppee [...]: 'I renounce Satan, etc ... In this letter (a mockery cons Empress Eugenie), [he] selected a few verses: [...] It's late 70's, a little later, probably ode to the grotesque. "
My poor old Louis, going on.
Farewell, seeks a barcarolle ...
Let's pretend to Perricholi ...
And you fly away, and I fly away, [the plan to fake literary, 9 syll.]
And we each have our nests ...
Finally, we must not forget that in a letter dated October 14, 1883, Delahaye has recomposed, supposedly from memory and Verlaine, the text of the three sonnets that last named "The Unclean "and are known as the apocryphal The debauchery. Delahaye has largely reconstituted two sonnets obscene novel, "Our buttocks are not theirs ..." and "Older animals highlights ..." but mostly nothing less than the fourteen lines of Sonnet du Trou du Cul then unknown.
All the twentieth century has clearly despised these bits, including poets and writers who have written about Rimbaud, Breton, Claudel, Aragon, Char, Reverdy, Bonnefoy, Gracq ... Personally, it is not one of those quotes that make us a good impression. If Delahaye was a forger, what a great poet did we lose there! Someone will say: "Maybe he has done to help?" In fact, only two quotes are from a level accessible to Delahaye. The verse: "At the foot of the dark walls, beating the skinny dogs ..." could face a work of pastiche, while despite a small character irreducibly striking, the verses of the novel in any Andromache "could have come under written by so many poets. In contrast, other quotes are all trademarks of engineering that can hardly be dependent imitative.
Against the thesis of citations from memory by a non-specialist language to, observe that all these quotes demonstrate accurate knowledge of versification in fact. Two discrete rules and difficult to observe spontaneously Nowhere are at fault. The proscription of the hiatus is observed without weakness and linking hemistiches may be cited as an example in this verse remarkable: "A Rose swallowed in the belly the doorman ... "No word step over a half-line to another within an Alexandrian, despite an abundance of certain audacious proclitics hyphenation. Who can believe that Delahaye remembered memory of the verse 13 of the first sonnet with filthy, first, his break (denoted by +) on a proclitic, ie determining the possessive "its "and then his two dieresis supported in the second half-line:" The front facing the + port we glorify Waitress "? Other academic dieresis are impeccably renewed in the words "husband-a" the Alexandrian "Brown, was sixteen when she was married, and in this case" Louis' first octosyllable City of Letter to Loulou: "My poor old Louis, going on." Remark Is there any lack of compliance in the spelling of the three filthy rhymes or eight supposed to have been plotted on a bell from Mezieres? In his biography of Arthur Rimbaud Jean-Jacques Lefrere, who speaks, unlike us, "bad stanza, for its part has not seen the license of the" s "chart that allows to combine the main" Desdouets (s) "with the plural of" wishes ". In 1908, Delahaye has not written: "Desdouest abomination" as it appears on page 297 of the transcript of the poem in the biography of Arthur Rimbaud Lefrere, but "an abomination Desdouests "as they can check on Gallica.
Specifically, Delahaye favors same spelling "Desdouets" in the body of his written account, as shown in this extract useful in understanding the eight lines: "M me Rimbaud prevented by circular - O sir Desdouets! ... you could not leave us alone? ... - Was therefore required his son to join him as soon brood university in the temple of Thalia and Melpomene. Arthur dryly replied that he felt no provision for theater. "If the biographer rightly think that it is not credible that these eight worms were immediately etched in the memory of an accomplice, he dismisses too quickly the track the manuscript undisclosed. Lefrere is reduced to consider this stanza as an example of these "pranks" or "big joke" between friends that can come as the poet's nobody, or which can be both a reflection of Authentic is a free invention of a witness willing to talk to him. Not only such an approach lacks the pejorative perfection formal poem, but it fails to make the scope. Delahaye introduced this poem as a creation of June 1871, not far from the bloody suppression of the Commune, and he gives context for the reopening of the school. Beyond the testimony blind Delahaye, this poem clearly reveals the spirit of anger that animates the bad jokes of Rimbaud and he still clearly state the policy reasons underlying the refusal of the poet to return to the school both in the period Communard of hope that the Bloody Week. Will anyone believe that Boor who created a false serves only to ridicule him because he does not understand the implications?
Getting back to the plane of the verse, only Letter to Loulou guess gaps. Of the five that we octosyllables Delahaye book, the first and last do not rhyme with any other lines, while two to four to rhyme all three in "-ol /-olle. Clearly, these are piecemeal and not five consecutive payments. Now the fourth verse quoted by Delahaye, as reproduced by Marcel Coulon and Daniel Mouret (Arthur Rimbaud 1 towards Louis Forestier Journal of Modern Literature , "Rimbaud as they knew him. Unpublished letters Izambard - Delahaye - Coulon, Minard, 1972, p.43-84), a problem of elision, if not quantity syllable: "And you fly away, and I fly [. ] "One of two things: either, like the poets of the sixteenth century by Barbey d'Aurevilly recovery, it is generally the license to remove the" s "marks the second person singular , or the verse is false, having then nine syllables. It is difficult to determine, given that both the indisputable vagueness of remembrance and we will not consider here the idea of a metric for a song like "O Seasons," and Song of the highest Tower in the version of the book A Season in Hell . Letter to the Loulou memory is a reconstruction of deficient and defective. We can notice also a striking feature common to three citations Delahaye. Three times, found swinging a bit towards a resumption of the same words and grammatical forms of the same: "We Jean Baudry, Jean Baluch us, "And you fly away (s) and I fly," In all your subscribers, clown, subscribe to your [.] "A what to add, "You have / Menti, on my femur, you lied, [...]." Could this be the emblem of poetry preserved by Delahaye Rimbaldian fun? The idea is not necessarily ridiculous. Let us assign this through too quickly to a forger Delahaye.
Thanks to a recent article by Genevieve Hodin: "Rimbaud, the reader of 'brilliant poet of July' (Rimbaud living No. 47, June 2008, p.45-51), the question of memory reconstructions by Delahaye rebounded interesting. The verse: "At the foot of the dark walls, beating the skinny dogs ..." is a rewrite of two inverted half-lines of the poem Alexandrine The Tank the collection of iambic Auguste Barbier :
Beating the skinny dogs, or along the great walls
Smokey whistling miles sketch unclean
This child does not believe, he spits on his mother,
[...]
A hemistich is even preserved as is and as Genevieve said Hodin, "we will never know if Rimbaud quoted a friend of Barber's front legs and ignoring , or passage from one of his [own] satires lost." Auguste Barbier is noted the author of a collection of satires and songs which contains sections Satires and dramatic Satires of comedy, which echoes the form of Delahaye "satire imitated from the lectern." Under such conditions, should we believe that Delahaye dared to mock the fans of Rimbaud? It must still consider that the poet was in its infancy a specialist who was eyeing to rewriting plagiarism ( Invocation to Venus , The Strennas orphans ). However, Genevieve Hodin informs us again that the verse 4 of the sonnet Buffet resumed passage of verse 4 of another poem of iambic , Laughter , reversing to new position of a half-line:
flowing from the heart like a flood of old wine. (Barbier)
As a flood of old wine, perfumes engaging. (Rimbaud)
The article then shows several passages in Rimbaud's work which seem to be inspired by Auguste Barbier, especially in terms of lexical some occasions as "flogs" and "ulcer". The poems hired as The Blacksmith , Paris is repopulated , Hands Jeanne-Marie and Man are just much more concerned by such rewrites. The combination of two words of the last line of Venus Anadyomene : "Beautiful hideously from an ulcer in the anus, seems to draw directly from another towards Barber" And the hideous ulcer gnaws flanks "(Melpomene ). And in this the Poet about flowers, expressions "lyre to songs iron "and" Century of hell "would be even more rewrites itself:" lyre with strings of brass "(The Lyre of brass ) and" century of brass ( iambics , Prologue). Even the lesson "brutal desire" qu'Izambard allegedly censored in an unknown original version of the poem A Music is in the works of Romantic poet: "To serve feed your desires brutal "( bribe ). It was worthwhile to discuss the details of such a record since Delahaye, if we want to assume forger, could not create a loan Barber would have the opportunity to coincide with a so intertextual practices of Rimbaud.
continued ...