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Today at the used bookstore I bought a copy of William Matthews' 1882 English translation of Sainte-Beuve's Causeries de lundi, with introductory essay on Sainte-Beuve's life and works.
The introductory essay is EIGHTY-SIX PAGES LONG. I do not know what an American translator would have to say about Sainte-Beuve at all, 15 years after his death, let alone for 86 pages.
But I am game to find out! For every note this post gets, I will read and report back on one page.
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Sainte-Beuve a vraiment fourni la description, le portrait parfait de la Pléiade quand il définit ce qu'il entend par "groupe" dans ses Nouveaux lundis :
"(...) association naturelle et comme spontanée de jeunes esprits et de jeunes talents, non pas précisément semblables et de la même famille, mais de la même volée et du même printemps, éclos sous le même astre, et qui se sentent nés, avec des variétés de goût et de vocation, pour une œuvre commune."
Louis, dit Aloysius BERTRAND. Gaspard de la nuit. Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot. Par Louis Bertrand. Précédé d'une notice par M. Sainte-Beuve.
Paris, Angers, Imprimerie-librairie de V. Pavie, et Paris, chez Labitte, 1842. Grand in-8, broché, couverture ornementée de papier vert.
Fameux recueil de poèmes en prose publié un an après la mort de l'auteur par ses amis. La publication fut, selon le mot de Charles Asselineau, “un des beaux échecs dont les annales de la librairie fassent mention” - une vingtaine d'exemplaires seulement furent placés, “tant donnés que vendus”.
Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) mourut à 34 ans de phtisie à Paris au terme d'une vie misérable consacrée à la rédaction de son unique recueil poétique. “Il passa presque toute sa vie, il usa sa jeunesse à ciseler en riche matière mille petites coupes d'une délicatesse infinie et d'une invention minutieuse, pour y verser ce que nos bons aïeux buvaient à même la gourde ou dans le creux de la main”, dit Sainte-Beuve en préface .Sa postérité littéraire et musicale est capitale. Baudelaire, d'abord, qui devait reconnaître sa dette en préface au Spleen de Paris: “C'est en feuilletant, pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux Gaspard de la Nuit d'Aloysius Bertrand [...] que l'idée m'est venue de tenter quelque chose d'analogue, et d'appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou plutôt d'une vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu'il avait appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.”
Plus tard, Maurice Ravel adapta trois poèmes, sous le titre général de Gaspard de la nuit, et Stéphane Mallarmé de confesser: “J'ai, comme tous les poètes de notre jeune génération, mes amis, un culte profond pour l'oeuvre exquis de Louis Bertrand.” André Breton et les surréalistes, enfin, saluèrent un de leurs devanciers.
bibliorare.com
why! why is he always like this!!
Hay momentos en que la vida, el fondo de la vida, se reabre por dentro de nosotros como una herida que sangra y que no quiere cerrarse.
Sainte-Beuve
Art: Andy Denzler, Woman on White Chaise Longue II, 2018
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We're up to 36 notes for Sainte-Beuve blogging, so here we go. I am starting with four pages of front matter, which I didn't count towards the complete page count.
So. Starting with a page of blurbs / excerpts from reviews of Sainte-Beuve's criticism in general, beginning with Matthew Arnold calling him "the finest critical spirit of our time" and the rest saying the same thing at greater length.
And then a translator's preface about how he chose the essays for this volume: "The final decision has been influenced by two considerations,--a desire to choose themes of intrinsic and permanent interest, and a a desire to give a due variety." Yes, that is a comma followed immediately by an em dash.
He goes on: "That the translator has done justice to the original in this attempt to reproduce in English come of the masterpieces of modern French criticism, he is very far from flattering himself. If the best translation, even of a thirs or fourth rate author is inevitably but the "seamy side of the cloth," then he may well despair who has undertaken to convey in English the curiosa felicitas, the subtle graces, and the delicate refinements of Sainte-Beuve's style. Adequately to do so would imply a genius hardly inferior to that of Sainte-Beuve himself."
(...man, why don't my faves get translators that love them THIS MUCH.)
And then the TOC. The essays chosen are on Lewis the Fourteenth (Lewis. LEWIS), Fenelon, Bossuet, Massilon, Pascal, Rousseau, Madame Geoffrin, Joubert, Guizot, the Abbe Galiani, and Frederic the Great; if I make it out of the intro (EIGHTY SIX PAGES of biography), I will take requests on which essays to tackle first.
...oh god and we've gone up to 45 notes in the time it's taken me to read and type this. So subtracting four pages of front matter, that'll be up through page xli of the intro.
About the same time, George Sand made use of Sainte-Beuve as her confessor. He seemed specially indicated for this function. In the first place, he looked rather ecclesiastical, and then he had a taste for secrets, and more particularly for whispered confessions. George Sand had absolute confidence in him. She considered that he had an almost angelic nature. In reality, just about that time, the angelic man was endeavouring to get into the good graces of the wife of his best friend, and was writing his Livre d'Amour, and divulging to the world a weakness of which he had taken advantage. This certainly was the most villainous thing a man could do.
George Sand, Some Aspects of her Life And Writing , by Rene Doumic
DRAAAAAG HIIIIIIIM part 2
omg snippet of a letter from Nerval to Saint-Beuve, 1832; apparently S-B was carrying on his weird controlling tendencies even past his whole Thing with Hugo. Translation below, all errors mine :P:
"(from Nerval):
I have understood that well, for he last two years that I’ve known Duseigneur and that I have entered the small circle of which he is a part and where I become more and more attached.
Certainly it was not formed with the intention of parodying the other, the glorious cenacle that you have celebrated, but only for a useful association and then a public of choice (that is,each other-P.A) where one can try his works in advance and to satisfy to a certain extent this need for publication, which makes one scatter a future of glory in small successive triumphs. It is also a very powerful spur to hear each day ask: what have you done? and to see people around you working ... "
Original French under the cut:
