Poetry
Les Villes tentaculaires
Not translated into English
Émile Verhaeren · 1895
Opening lines
La plaine est morne et ses chaumes et granges
Et ses fermes dont les pignons sont vermoulus,
La plaine est morne et lasse et ne se défend plus,
La plaine est morne et morte—et la ville la mange.
The plain is dreary, and its thatch and barns
And its farms whose gables are worm-eaten,
The plain is dreary and weary and defends itself no more,
The plain is dreary and dead, and the city devours it.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Twenty free-verse poems that take the city as their character. The plain empties and is covered with sheds where “people toil far from the sun,” and everything converges on the city. Then come the soul of the city, its cathedrals, its port, its spectacles, its women strollers, its factories, its Stock Exchange, its bazaar, the vice district near the port, then revolt, the museum, death, the research of the scholars and ideas. Between these scenes stand four statues, a monk, a soldier, a bourgeois and an apostle.
Context
The collection appeared in Brussels from Edmond Deman, with a frontispiece by Théo van Rysselberghe. It forms a diptych with a 1893 collection on the countryside emptied by the exodus, and the two books were most often printed together from 1904. Remy de Gourmont read in it treatises of sociology put into verse: the hallucinated countrysides seized and devoured by the cities. It is this book that established its author's European reputation.
Who it is for
A series of ample pieces, written directly in French, made of enumerations and repetitions; the text is freely available on Wikisource.
Prizes and reception
The book that carried its author beyond Belgium; Britannica counts it among his principal works.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.