Marcel Schwob - Böcker

The unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by Mallarmé, Jarry and Gide, in a new translationWhen Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stéphane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of Schwob’s intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a “girl of the streets” named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

Twenty one of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest tales, translated to English for the first timeFirst published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the Golden Mask gathers 21 of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, Schwob’s stories portray clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating form as it comes into contact with this unparalleled imagination.

“The art of the biographer consists specifically in choice. He is not meant to worry about speaking truth; he must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.”—Marcel SchwobImaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique lives, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung.Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. The secret influence on generations of writers, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French).

“I’ve just read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think I’d never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is he?”—Rainer Maria RilkeMarcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which—instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem—instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish.Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.

Exquisitely crafted essays on medieval criminal slang, ancient Greek prostitution, laughter, anarchy and more from the endlessly influential Marcel Schwob“All over the world,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges, “there are devotees of the writer Marcel Schwob who constitute little secret societies.” Spicilege, Schwob’s last book published under his name, constitutes the handbook to these societies—to Schwob’s work, to himself as erudite scholar and author, and to the twilight of the era of French Symbolism. Schwob was, as Paul Léautaud described him, a “living library,” and the critical biographies gathered in the essays of Spicilege display a few of the volumes in that library: his groundbreaking research on François Villon (work that remains a cornerstone to our knowledge of Villon), his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is the carefully developed ideas in these essays and the eccentric yet thorough scholarship that draws them together that are of particular interest today: the understanding of criminal slang in the Middle Ages; the study of prostitution in ancient Greece; the folklore inspired by a Flaubert story; a complex critique of individuality that effectively laid the groundwork for Jarry’s “pataphysics”; as well as ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy.Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth, an incomparable storyteller and a secret influence on generations of writers, from Apollinaire and Borges to Roberto Bolaño and J. Rodolfo Wilcock.