Rein Bloem Volgorde van de boeken (chronologisch)

Dutch

Het is een duivelse ronde die Apollinaire hier ontvouwt, aan de grenzen van kunst en leven. Werkelijke oplichters en valse messiassen, criminelen in afwachting van heiligverklaring, charlatans en mystagogi, beulen en martelaren, leven samen met de moderne avatars van de zwervende Jood. Vaak irreverent en parodisch, imiteren deze verhalen met een subtiel gevoel voor waarschijnlijkheid enkele van de meest bijzondere episodes uit de kerkgeschiedenis. Ze putten uit folkloristische en fantastische tradities, maar ook uit de persoonlijke herinneringen van de auteur. In zijn schijnbare wanorde - 23 verhalen geschreven tussen 1902 en 1910 - volgt L'Hérésiarque een levendige logica, die een spel van assonanties en affiniteiten weerspiegelt, vergelijkbaar met Alcools. Zo verwijst de conclusie van het laatste verhaal de lezer terug naar die eeuwigheid waarin de held van het eerste verhaal zich bevindt, met een lichte humor en een mengeling van eruditie en pure fantasie die de charme van de bundel vormt.

Apollinaire was Modernism's first champion, and after his early death in 1918, he became its first saint. Lying in a hospital bed in 1915, recovering from combat wounds suffered in World War I, Apollinaire assembled the fragments of a tragicomic, mock-epic and occasionally obscene autobiography-a-clef: The Poet Assassinated . This novella recounts the life and death of Croniamantal, whose birth is -saluted- by the Eiffel Tower's -beautiful erection, - who rises through the Parisian literary world to proclaim himself -the greatest of living poets, - and who is then torn to pieces by a mob. A statue built -out of nothing, like poetry and glory, - is constructed in his honor. This translation is by Matthew Josephson, an American editor who arrived in Paris just after the war and entered the circle of avant-garde artists and poets that had been galvanized by Apollinaire's life and death. Josephson was among the first to introduce these Dadaists and Surrealists to the U.S. via his small magazine, Broom , and among his most ambitious projects was this translation, published by Broom as a limited-edition book in 1923 and never since reprinted.

At the time of its release in 1860, Charles Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels) met with immediate praise. One of the most important French symbolists, Baudelaire led a debauched, violent, and ultimately tragic life, dying an opium addict in 1867. This book, a response to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, serves as a memoir of Baudelaire's last years. In this beautifully wrought portrait of the effects of wine, opium, and hashish on the mind, Baudelaire captures the dreamlike visions he experienced during his narcotic trances. These hallucinations, sometimes exquisite, sometimes disturbing, and the delusions of grandeur that often accompanied them, constitute the Paradis Artificiels, the gorgeous yet false worlds of ecstasy that eventually led to his ruin. Contrasting the effects of hashish and opium with those of wine, Baudelaire concludes that "wine exalts the will, hashish destroys it" and makes idlers of all those who use it.