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Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley: 1882

Today is the birthday of Alfred Sisley (Paris; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899 Moret-sur-Loing); Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship.  Perhaps the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (i.e., outdoors).  He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.

Among his important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton Court, executed in 1874, and landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing.  The notable paintings of the Seine and its bridges in the former suburbs of Paris are like many of his landscapes, characterized by tranquillity, in pale shades of green, pink, purple, dusty blue and cream.

In 1866, Sisley began a relationship with Eugénie Lesouezec (1834–1898; also known as Marie Lescouezec), a Breton living in Paris.  Sisley died at the age of 59, a few months after the death of his wife.

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  St. Martin Canal, 1870

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  Early Snow at Louveciennes, c. 1871-1872

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  Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne 1872

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  Sentier de la Mi-cote, Louveciennes, 1873

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  Fog, Voisins, 1874

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  Among the Vines Louveciennes, 1874

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  Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874

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  Regatta at Hampton Court, 1874

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  Regatta at Molesey, 1874

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  Snow on the Road Louveciennes, 1874

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  Under the Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874

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  Meadow, 1875

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  Le Pont de Moret, effet d’orage, 1887, Musée Malraux, Le Havre

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  Small Meadows in Spring, c. 1881

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  View of Saint-Mammès, (circa 1880). The Walters Art Museum.

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  A path at Les Sablons, 1883

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  Women Going to the Woods, 1886

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  Seaside, Langland , 1887

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  Church in Moret, 1889

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  Saint-Mammès am Morgen, 1890

  

  Today is the birthday of Ambroise Paul Valéry (Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry; Sète, Hérault, Occitanie, France; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945 Paris); poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.

  Perhaps best known as a poet, he is sometimes considered to be the last of the French symbolists. He published fewer than a hundred poems. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Valéry underwent an existential crisis, an event that impacted his writing career. Around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years. This hiatus was in part due to the death of his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé. When, in 1917, he finally broke his ‘great silence’ with the publication of La Jeune Parque; he was forty-six years of age.

  This sublimely musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets, took him four years to complete, and it secured his fame. With “Le Cimetière marin” and “L’Ébauche d’un serpent,” it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest French poems of the twentieth century.

  The title refers to the youngest of the three Parcae (the minor Roman deities also called The Fates). The poem is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and estrangement, in a setting dominated by the sea, the sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun.

  In 1900, he married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarmé’s family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride’s cousin, Morisot’s daughter, Julie Manet married the painter, Ernest Rouart.

  Valéry died in Paris in 1945. He is buried in the cemetery of his native town, Sète, the same cemetery celebrated in his famous poem, Le Cimetière marin.

  Verse 

  Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

  • Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
    Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
    Midi le juste y compose de feux
    La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée
    O récompense après une pensée
    Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!
    • This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
      Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
      Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
      That sea forever starting and re-starting.
      When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
      Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
      • Le Cimetière Marin
    • Variant translations:
    • The sea, the ever renewing sea!

  • Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
    Maint diamant d’imperceptible écume,
    Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
    Quand sur l’abîme un soleil se repose,
    Ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause,
    Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
    • What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
      The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
      What peace I feel begotten at that source!
      When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
      Time’s air is sparkling, dream is certainty —
      Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!
    Après tant d’orgueil, après tant d’étrange
    Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir,
    Je m’abandonne à ce brillant espace,
    Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe
    Qui m’apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.
    • Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!
      After such arrogance, after so much strange
      Idleness — strange, yet full of potency —
      I am all open to these shining spaces;
      Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes,
      Ghosting along — a ghost subduing me.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Ici venu, l’avenir est paresse.
    L’insecte net gratte la sécheresse;
    Tout est brûlé, défait, reçu dans l’air
    A je ne sais quelle sévère essence . . .
    La vie est vaste, étant ivre d’absence,
    Et l’amertume est douce, et l’esprit clair.
    • Now present here, the future takes its time.
      The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
      All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
      To some ineffably rarefied solution . . .
      Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
      And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse,
    La sainte impatience meurt aussi!
    • All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
      Am I. Divine impatience also dies.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
    L’air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
    La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
    Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
    Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux rejouies
    Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
    • The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
      The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
      Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
      Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
      Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
      This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis
    • Variant translations:
    • The wind is rising … we must attempt to live.

And today is the birthday of Ezra Pound (Ezra Weston Loomis Pound; Hailey, Idaho Territory 30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972 Venice); poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement.  His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.  His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.  This included arranging for the publication in 1915 of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Pound lost faith in England and blamed the WWI on usury and international capitalism.  He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini’s fascism and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley.  During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason.  He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: “when the raft broke and the waters went over me”.  Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

While in custody in Italy, Pound had begun work on sections of The Cantos.  These were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy.  Largely due to a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to live in Italy until his death.  His political views ensure that his work remains as controversial now as it was during his lifetime.  Hemingway wrote: “The best of Pound’s writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature.”

At a literary salon in January 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and her daughter Dorothy, who became his wife in 1914.  Through Olivia Shakespear he was introduced to her former lover W. B. Yeats.  Pound had sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento the previous year, before he left for Venice, and Yeats had apparently found it charming.  The men became close friends, although Yeats was older by 20 years.

Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the fall of 1922, beginning a love affair that lasted 50 years.  Biographer John Tytell believes Pound had always felt that his creativity and ability to seduce women were linked, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over the years.  Shortly after arriving in Paris, he complained that he had been there for three months without having managed to find a mistress.  He was introduced to Olga at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain.  The two moved in different social circles: Olga was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother’s Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while his friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.  They spent the following summer in the south of France, where Pound worked with George Antheil to apply the concept of Vorticism to music, and managed to write two operas, including Le Testament de Villon. He wrote pieces for solo violin, which Olga performed.

On his 87th birthday, 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom.  The next night he was admitted to the Civil Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, with Olga at his side.  Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral.  Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinsky.  Dorothy died in England the following year.  Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound.