Tired Beasts

I've been working on Maeterlinck, the poet, playwright, and cod-philosopher. Maeterlinck was a massive deal in the 1890s, probably the most talked about writer in Europe. He got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 and his early experimental plays were perhaps the greatest dramatic achievement of the Symbolist movement. But after the first world war his reputation went into decline to the point that at his death in 1949 few people realised he was still alive. He more or less stopped writing poetry and plays after the mid-twenties (and what plays he did write didn't get produced) and instead concentrated on a series of mystical works addressing metaphysical themes (death, god, the afterlife, fate) but from a broadly agnostic position. These were taken tremendously seriously for a while but as the Second World War approached, his airy mysticism seemed dated and ill-suited to the urgencies of the time.

But his early plays are wonderful and hugely influential. Of the longer plays, Pelléas and Mélisande survives particularly in the Debussy opera (to which, initially, Maeterlinck was bitterly opposed, less because of aesthetic differences than Debussy's refusal to cast Maeterlinck's lover, Georgette Leblanc, in the lead) and The Blue Bird is a charming fairy story, still revived. But it's the shorter one-act plays that are so astonishing. The Blind, Interior, Intruder, The Death of Tintagiles, The Seven Princesses use the simplest of language and setting to create experiences of intense otherworldliness, of dread and anxiety, of metaphysical anguish and terror. His influence is there in Chekhov, in Jarry, in Pinter and Beckett. He opened up space for silence and stillness as fully dramatic devices and is one of the giants of early Modernist theatre.

What I'd never properly read before are his poems. There's not many of them, several chansons and one substantial collection, which was actually the first book he published, a sequence of 33 poems called Serres Chaudes [Hothouses] which first appeared in a limited private edition in May 1889. I've been reading them recently and I am surprised to find how great they are. They are suffused with a listless melancholy; Maeterlinck (or perhaps the implied speaker) talks of his soul as a kind of hothouse, unhealthily humid, producing distorted overgrown plants that stifle his happiness and desire, looking longingly out of the glass, longing for rain. Odd images pulse through the poems, ships passing on canals, hospital windows, soldiers not at their posts, the mortally ill struggling with the elements, desire stifled and impotent, action and engagement with the world frustrated. Some of the poems are traditionally formal, rhymed, organised in regular stanzas. Others show the influence of Jules Laforgue and Gustave Kahn in their long lines of free-verse, their inward-looking intensity, their sense of the nausea of everyday life.

The wonderful poet Richard Howard has produced a lovely set of translations published by Princeton University Press (though, note, it has some annoying typos). I've translated one of the poems here:

Tired Beasts
    
On the narrow paths of my passions,
With howls and sighs.
Sick and with shuttered eyes,
Over fallen leaves:

The yellow dogs of my sin,
The dark jackals of my hate,
And on the pale flat plains
The crouching lions of love.

In the impotence of dream
Lazed beneath a lazy sky
A dismal drab sky
They dully see

The lambs of my temptations
Wander singly from the meadow, leaving
Beneath the unmoving moon
My unmoved wants.

Fauves Las

Ô les passions en allées,
Et les rires et les sanglots!
Malades et les yeux mi-clos
Parmi les feuilles effeuillées,

Les chiens jaunes de mes péchés,
Les hyènes louches de mes haines,
Et sur l'ennui pâle des plaines
Les lions de l'amour couchés!

En l'impuissance de leur rêve
Et languides sous la langueur
De leur ciel morne et sans couleur,
Elles regarderont sans trève

Les brebis des tentations
S'éloigner lentes, une à une,
En l'immobile clair de lune,
Mes immobiles passions.