Belgian Francophone Library – serie

Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), art critic, poet and homme de lettres, was a man whose vision transcended his native Belgium. With close ties to Mallarmé in France and Rilke in Germany, Verhaeren, a peripatetic student of the arts, readily traveled to Paris, Berlin, Cassel, Vienna and Amsterdam. From the mid-1880s until his death in 1916, his many trips abroad resulted in a raft of essays and short monographs on the arts of the Northern Renaissance. Yet, despite the insights, scholarship and markedly precise and revealing descriptions of these studies, they have long been neglected in art historical circles, overshadowed, perhaps, by Verhaeren’s own poetic outpourings and his numerous essays on contemporary art. In this book, Albert Alhadeff translates, edits, annotates and contextualizes these often brilliant and always revealing studies on artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Memling, Bruegel and Grünewald, masters from the North who worked mostly in Flanders, Holland and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Alhadeff reveals, Verhaeren’s studies of the masters of old in Germany, Flanders and the newly born Dutch Republic are as much about Verhaeren the man as they are about the subjects of his inquiries.

Comment aborder la litterature des espaces francophones europeens en dehors de la France ? Identite et/ou alterite ? Qu'en pensent les auteur-e-s concerne-e-s vis-a-vis de leur ecriture ? Ce volume est issu du colloque qui a eu lieu a l'Universite d'Edimbourg les 14 et 15 mars 2008, dont les objectifs etaient d'explorer les notions d'identite et d'alterite dans les espaces francophones europeens, tout particulierement en Belgique et en Suisse romande, sans oublier les ecrivain-e-s qui sont en quelque sorte en exil par rapport a leur pays et/ou leur langue. Ce livre presente un eventail d'auteur-e-s et de textes, du 19e au 21e siecle, y compris Bovard, Brel, Cingria, Gevers, Michaux, Nothomb, Nouge, Plisnier ou encore Verhaeren sans oublier les ecrivaines Anne-Lise Grobety, Marie-Jose Piguet, Silvia Ricci Lempen et Elisa Brune presentes au colloque et qui ont participe a une table ronde retranscrite dans ce volume. Le domaine de la traduction est egalement represente, pour etudier la facon dont les oeuvres sont traduites, parfois par l'auteur-e meme.Les contributions viennent de nombreux pays, et les auteur-e-s sont tous/toutes reuni-e-s par la langue francaise et l'amour de la litterature francophone de tous horizons.

A Maeterlinck Reader is a compilation of plays, poems, essays, short stories and aphorisms by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Maurice Maeterlinck. The editors have included, in fresh translations that convey Maeterlinck’s revolutionary innovations in theatrical language, selections that show facets both exemplary and extraordinary of this Nobel Prize winning author, the «Missing Link of Modern Drama.»

The twenty-two essays in this volume are contributed by Belgian, French, and American scholars to honor the memory and work of Adrienne Fontainas (1929-2010). The interdisciplinary scholarship this community of international scholars has produced is of lasting importance in underlining the significant role of Brussels from 1870 to 1914. A leading European scholar and bibliophile, Adrienne Fontainas served as Vice President of the International Association of Bibliophiles and membre d’honneur of the Royal Society of Bibliophiles and Iconophiles of Belgium. Her groundbreaking books on the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his Brussels’ editor Edmond Deman (Edmond Deman éditeur : Art et édition au tournant du siècle and Edmond Deman : Publications de la librairie) are model studies of the book publishing trade in France and Belgium.The essays in this book explore a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields, including art history, book collecting, publishing, literature and music, and cover subjects such as Félicien Rops, William Degouve de Nuncques, Symbolism and Surrealism, Maurice Maeterlinck and Émile Verhaeren, Paul Signac, Victor Horta, Edmond Picard, André Fontainas, Edmond Deman, and Franz Liszt in Belgium. In addition, a comprehensive bibliography of Adrienne Fontainas’ writings in the visual arts, literature, and music, as well as a discussion of her working methodology, are included.This book contains contributions in French and English.

Correspondance is the name of a Belgian Surrealist magazine published in 1924–1925 by Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. It is considered as seminal as Breton’s «Surrealist Manifesto» (1924). The texts were tart, obscure responses to the arcane literary debates of the time, in particular those underway in André Breton’s circle in Paris. Twenty-two issues of Correspondance were printed, in a modernist typeface on different color papers, and were distributed by mail to selected recipients. Unlike their Parisian associates, the Belgians made an explicit choice against the book as a host medium for literary and other experiments. Nougé, the chief theorist, and his colleagues remained suspicious throughout their careers not only of commercialized literature, but also of literature itself, which they saw as a means to political action, never a goal in itself. Although little recognized, Belgian Surrealists and Correspondance, their earliest manifestation, remain anticipatory and influential in modernist writing practice, especially for their ephemeral style of publishing (proto-mail art) and their intentional plagiarisms (precursor to Situationist détournement).

This is the first English publication of a major work by one of Belgium’s greatest writers – Franz Hellens. As a prime example of his «fantastic realism,» this novel takes its narrator-hero, Théophile, through a series of adventures that range from the touchingly down-to-earth to the extravagantly bizarre. With its rich multiplicity of character and incident, as well as a narrative that surprises the reader at every turn, this book is an ideal introduction to a unique, and too long neglected, voice in twentieth-century literature.

Originally published in 1992, this bilingual anthology represents the vigor, diversity, and originality with which the Symbolist movement was grafted in Belgium. Cultivating an aesthetics of hallucination and spatial paradigms of the inner world, the fin de siècle Belgian poets transformed the canal cities and landscapes of their homeland into lasting magnets of the imagination. The Belgian Symbolist poems are vessels of passage to visionary realms, demonstrating the permeability of inner and outer reality.