Georges Rodenbach – författare

Det här är berättelsen om Hugues Viane, en änkling som sökt sig till den melankoliska och förfallna staden Brygge för att sörja sin döda hustru. Den begravningslika stämningen ekar lika mycket på stadens övergivet grå gator som i Hugues hjärta. Det enda som gör sorgen uthärdlig är att promenera runt, runt i de labyrintiska medeltidskvarteren. Men så får Hugues syn på en aktris som är den döda hustruns fysiska dubbelgångare. Detta leder till en serie händelser kantade av psykologisk vånda och emotionell förödmjukelse som oundvikligen för Hugues mot dramats ödesdigra upplösning och vansinnesdåd. Brygge-den-döda av den belgiske författaren Georges Rodenbach publicerades för första gången 1892 och är ett av dekadenslitteraturens och symbolismens förnämsta verk. Det här är en poets roman – om man kan kalla det för roman – metaforiskt tät och visionär i sin stil. Den är också berömd för att vara det första fiktiva verk som illustrerats med fotografier – dessa ingår i föreliggande utgåva. Översättningen till svenska är gjord av Cecilia Carlander som också försett boken med ett belysande efterord.

Known principally for Bruges-la-Morte, a key work of Belgian Symbolism, Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) is also the author of other works worthy of present-day study. His collections of poetry, his plays, and his other novels subtly rework themes which evoke his native Flanders. This volume contains the texts of two of his plays: Le Voile enacts a whole network of themes with a connection to Bruges – a veritable summary of the “intimism” which was the glory of literary and artistic Belgium in the 1890s – while Le Mirage adapts Bruges-la-Morte for the stage, in an attempt to exteriorise thoughts which in the novel were essentially self-enclosed.This is a volume in the series Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

"Bruges-la-Morte" is the story of one man's obsession with his dead wife and his soul's struggle between an alluring young dancer - his late wife's double - and the beautiful, melancholy city of Bruges, whose moody atmosphere mirrors his mourning. This hallmark of Belgian symbolist literature, originally published in 1892 and first translated into English by Philip Mosley to great acclaim twenty years ago, is now back in print for the next generation of English readers to discover. With penetrating psychological force and richly metaphorical language, "Bruges-la-Morte" draws a haunting picture of love, grief, and murder in what has become a "dead city," severely Catholic and once proud. The source of the famous opera Die tote Stadt and endless inspiration for Belgian and French artists, this novella will enthrall readers with its dark portrait of fin-de-siecle Europe.

Rodenbach is known first and foremost for his famous novel Bruges la Morte. Bruges was his muse and poetic source, the landscape in which he attempted to reveal the significance of what appeared lifeless or unconnected to art. Using the symbolist devices of suggestion and mood, Rodenbach sifts the elements that make up the decaying Bruges which he sees as a medieval corpse laid out for him to 'rescue' through his interpretation of its atmosphere of melancholy, its seductive romantic decline and its lonely atmosphere. With rare beauty and delicacy, Rodenbach's poetry spins its web of tonal impressionism and seems always to exist on the border of silence.

The archetypal Symbolist novel, and a gorgeous tapestry of death and melancholy, Bruges-la-Morte was also the first work of fiction to employ photographs in the style of Breton, Drndic and SebaldA widower, Hugues Viane, takes refuge in the decay of Bruges, living among the relics of his dead wife as he transforms his home and the very city he inhabits into her spatial embalmment. Spinning out his existence in a mournful, silent labyrinth of entombed streets and the cold arteries of canals, Viane takes comfort in his narcissistic delirium, until his world is shaken by the appearance of his wife’s doppelganger: a young dancer encountered in the street, whose appearance conjures a sequence of events that will introduce the specter of reality into his ritualist dream-state to disastrous effect.The archetype of the Symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, first published in 1892, remains Georges Rodenbach’s most famous work; it has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations, and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was also a precursor to such authors as André Breton and W.G. Sebald in being the first novel to employ photographs as illustrations—to allow readers, as Rodenbach put it, to “be subject to the presence of the town, feel the contagion of the neighboring waters, sense in their turn the shadow of the high towers reaching across the text.”Georges Rodenbach (1855–98) was one of the major figures of Belgian Symbolism, an essential bridge between the Belgian and Parisian literary scenes, and a friend and colleague of Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Mallarmé and Huysmans. He was the author of four novels, eight collections of verse and numerous short stories, plays and critical works.