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    Hothouses: Poems, 1889
    Hothouses: Poems, 1889
    Hothouses: Poems, 1889
    Ebook130 pages44 minutes

    Hothouses: Poems, 1889

    By Maurice Maeterlinck and Richard Howard

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    On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary greatness had begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later Antonin Artaud pronounced, "Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the multiple riches of the subconscious into literature."


    Richard Howard's translation of this quietly radical work is the first to be published in nearly a century, and the first to accurately convey Maeterlinck's elusive visionary force. The poems, some of them in free verse (new to Belgium at the time), combine the decadent symbolism and the language of dislocation that Maeterlinck later perfected in his dramas. Hothouses reflects the influence not only of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. As for the title, the author said it was "a natural choice, Ghent . . . abounding in greenhouses."


    The poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French originals, are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne that appeared in the original volume, and by an early prose text by Maeterlinck imaginatively describing a painting by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel.


    A feat of daring power extraordinarily immediate and inventive, Hothouses will appeal to all lovers of poetry, and in particular to those interested in Modernism. Maeterlinck's enormous fame may have faded, but twentieth-century writers such as Beckett are still our masters who testify to its undying influence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 8, 2020
    ISBN9780691222424
    Hothouses: Poems, 1889

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      Book preview

      Hothouses - Maurice Maeterlinck

      HOTHOUSES

      NICHOLAS JENKINS

      Series Editor

      Horace, The Odes: New Translations

      by Contemporary Poets

      edited by J. D. McClatchy

      Hothouses: Poems 1889

      by Maurice Maeterlinck

      translated by Richard Howard

      HOTHOUSES POEMS 1889

      Maurice Maeterlinck

      Translated by Richard Howard

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS · PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      COPYRIGHT © 2003 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,

      PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

      IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS,

      3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

      ISBN: 0-691-08837-3

      ISBN (PBK.): 0-691-08838-1

      eISBN: 978-0-691-22242-4

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      MAETERLINCK, MAURICE, 1862–1949.

      [SERRES CHAUDES. ENGLISH]

      HOTHOUSES / MAURICE MAETERLINCK ; TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD.

      P. CM.

      ISBN 0-691-08837-3 (CL : ALK. PAPER)—ISBN 0-691-08838-1 (PB : ALK. PAPER)

      I. HOWARD, RICHARD, 1929– II. TITLE.

      PQ2625.A45 S513 2003

      841'.8—DC21 2002035698

      BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

      THIS BOOK IS SUPPORTED BY THE CHARLES LACY LOCKERT FUND OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ALL WOODCUTS BY GEORGES MINNE, CIRCA 1889. © ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/SABAM, BRUSSELS. PHOTOGRAPHS © 2003 MUSEUM ASSOCIATES/ LACMA.

      WWW.PUPRESS.PRINCETON.EDU

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

      R0

      Contents

      Translator’s Note vii

      Chronology xi

      HOTHOUSES 1

      Appendix:

      The Massacre of the Innocents 95

      Translator’s Note

      ON MAY 31, 1889, Vanier (Verlaine’s publisher) issued in an edition of 155 copies a sequence of 33 poems, 25 in regular, mostly octosyllabic verses, 8 in free verse, a technique already introduced in France by Laforgue and Gustave Kahn but new to Belgium.

      The work had been announced as early as 1886 in a little magazine of the period, initially as Les Symboliques, then as Les Tentations, and definitively as Serres chaudes [Hothouses], a title that the author, a young lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent, recalled as a natural choice, Ghent being a horticultural center, abounding in greenhouses and conservatories of all kinds.

      To the end of his long life, Maeterlinck was convinced that, as he once wrote to Emile Verhaeren, there is nothing in the book but Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and as people keep telling me, Whitman—almost nothing of myself except perhaps that feeling of things not being where they belong.

      Which was just the point, of course. These deviant liturgies take their place in that lineage of French-language poetic alienations (suggestive titles: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, 1857; Hugo’s Les Chatiments, 1870; Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer, 1873), and indeed Serres chaudes forms a hinge between Decadence and a more startling, virtually surreal dislocation which Maeterlinck was to devise in prose (a theater of silence), immediately after he had released these miasmatic exhalations, which figure so guilefully among Modernism’s first gasps.

      Inveterately, critics have found the formal poems in Serres chaudes exasperating. Were they not the very decadence of Decadence, a haggard bloom reluctantly trailing from the littérature Verlaine had declared all the rest to be, to that still-undetermined modernisme exposed by the astonishing broken imagery of vers libre?

      No wonder Max Nordau attacked Serres chaudes so greedily in 1892 as instructively degenerate, not perceiving signs of renewal in the uneasy coexistence of convention and innovation: on the one hand those sorrowing lyrics, static and indeed paralyzed, all-too-knowing in their overheated nursery, and on the other, these disjointed, irrational litanies in turmoil. For us, of course, it is easy enough to see Whitman (the Whitman people saw in Maeterlinck) as the antidote to Latin (i.e., French) decadence, not musical but tormented and rhythmically jarring—as Patrick McGuinness, Maeterlinck’s best critic, puts it, an anarchy, but not of freedom and community, but of constriction and isolation.

      It was, remarkably, Antonin Artaud who from his uniquely vulnerable position identified the necessarily creative energy of this work (in 1924!): Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the miltiple riches of the subconscious into literature. That insight (however dubious the prioritarian claim) makes it easier for us to realize that the opulent sickliness of these poems leads to the stark minimalism of the one-act plays and of Pelléas; we find in both genres the double metaphor of freedom and claustration, of transparency and enclosure, and can acknowledge as only natural the enthusiasm—forgotten nowadays—of those pillars of our incomparable modernity Chekhov and Strindberg, Rilke and Yeats, Mallarmé and Proust.

      Certainly Maeterlinck’s enormous fame has vanished, though Beckett and William Empson are still among our masters to testify to its significance, its validity. I have added a chronology not to rectify but to establish the record, and have also included, as an appendix to

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