Leonie Joubert is a freelance science writer with a special interest in climate change, biodiversity, natural history, agriculture, energy issues and wine.

Her first book, Scorched: South Africa's Changing Climate (Wits University Press, 2006), blends the hard facts of climate change "with humour, history, vivid descriptions of people" and delivers it with "an amazing personal sense of wonder" (Brenda Martin, Goedgedacht Forum).

Awards[link]

In May 2007 Scorched was awarded an Honorary Mention by the judging panel of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.

"The judges have chosen to cite Scorched for an Honorary Award for breaking into the new territory of science journalism, and its skill in popularising this often inaccessible field."^[1][2]

Further research[link]

Leonie has just been awarded the Ruth First Fellowship by the University of the Witwatersrand.

References[link]

GFDL[link]

This text is licensed under the GFDL, as per [1]

This article about a South African writer or poet is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Born	(1844-03-30)30 March 1844 Metz, France
Died	8 January 1896(1896-01-08) (aged 51) Paris, France
Occupation	Poet
Genres	Symbolist
Influences Charles Baudelaire, Charles Leconte de Lisle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud
Influenced Maksim Bahdanovič, Arthur Rimbaud, Tom Verlaine
Signature

Paul-Marie Verlaine (French pronunciation: [vɛʁˈlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

Verlaine's birthplace, Haute-Pierre street in Metz.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Born in Metz, he was educated at the Lycée impérial Bonaparte (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard^[1] (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France; Emmanuel Chabrier; inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros; the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; Theodore de Banville; François Coppée; Jose-Maria de Heredia; Leconte de Lisle; Catulle Mendes, and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866),^[2] though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.

Marriage and military service[link]

Verlaine's private life spills over into his work, beginning with his love for Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. Mauté became Verlaine's wife in 1870. At the proclamation of the Third Republic in the same year, Verlaine joined the 160th battalion of the Garde nationale, turning Communard on 18 March 1871.

He became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Paris Commune. Verlaine escaped the deadly street fighting known as the Bloody Week, or Semaine Sanglante, and went into hiding in the Pas-de-Calais.

Relationships with Rimbaud and Létinois[link]

Plaque in Brussels

Paul Verlaine during his career.

Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover.^[2] Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.

The poems collected in Romances sans paroles (1874) were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans paroles was published while Verlaine was imprisoned. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French, Latin and Greek and drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire.^[3] From there he went to teach in Boston, before moving to Bournemouth.^[4] While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse. He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.

Final years[link]

Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. He lived in slums and public hospitals, and spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes. Fortunately, the French people's love of the arts was able to resurrect support and bring in an income for Verlaine: his early poetry was rediscovered, his lifestyle and strange behavior in front of crowds attracted admiration, and in 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers.

His poetry was admired and recognized as ground-breaking, and served as a source of inspiration to composers. Gabriel Fauré composed many mélodies, such as the song cycles Cinq mélodies "de Venise" and La bonne chanson, which were settings of Verlaine's poems.^[5] Claude Debussy set to music Clair de lune and six of the Fêtes galantes poems, forming part of the mélodie collection known as the Recueil Vasnier,^[6] and the Belgian-British composer Poldowski (daughter of Henryk Wieniawski) set 21 of Verlaine's poems.

His drug dependence and alcoholism caught up with him and took a toll on his life. Paul Verlaine died in Paris at the age of 51 on 8 January 1896; he was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles (he was first buried in the 20th division, but his grave was moved to the 11th division - on the round about, a much better location - when the Boulevard Périphérique was built).

Style[link]

Verlaine drinking absinthe in the Café François 1er in 1892, photographed by Paul Marsan Dornac

Much of the French poetry produced during the fin de siècle was characterized as "decadent" for its lurid content or moral vision. In a similar vein, Verlaine used the expression poète maudit ("cursed poet") in 1884 to refer to a number of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud who had fought against poetic conventions and suffered social rebuke or were ignored by the critics. But with the publication of Jean Moréas' Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, it was the term symbolism which was most often applied to the new literary environment. Along with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others began to be referred to as "Symbolists". These poets would often share themes that parallel Schopenhauer's aesthetics and notions of will, fatality and unconscious forces, and used themes of sex (such as prostitutes), the city, irrational phenomena (delirium, dreams, narcotics, alcohol), and sometimes a vaguely medieval setting.

In poetry, the symbolist procedure—as typified by Verlaine—was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation.

Portrayals[link]

Numerous artists painted Verlaine's portrait. Among the most illustrious were Henri Fantin-Latour, Antonio de la Gándara, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Courbet, Frédéric Cazalis, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.

• 

  by Gustave Courbet
  Between 1844-1877
• 

  by Eugène Carrière
  1890
• 

  by Edmond Aman-Jean
  1892
• 

  by Edouard Chantalat
  1898
  Posthumous,
  from a photograph.

In popular culture[link]

In preparation for Operation Overlord, the BBC had signaled to the French Resistance that the opening lines of the 1866 Verlaine poem "Chanson d'Automne" were to indicate the start of D-Day operations. The first three lines of the poem,

"Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l'automne"

("Long sobs of autumn violins"), meant that Operation Overlord was to start within two weeks. These lines were broadcast on 1 June 1944. The next set of lines, "Blessent mon coeur / d'une langueur / monotone" ("wound my heart with a monotonous languor"), meant that it would start within 48 hours and that the resistance should begin sabotage operations especially on the French railroad system; these lines were broadcast on 5 June at 23:15.^[7][8][9]

Among the admirers of Verlaine's work was the Russian language poet and novelist Boris Pasternak. Pasternak went so far as to translate much of Verlaine's verse into Russian. According to Pasternak's mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya,

Whenever [Boris Leonidovich] was provided with literal versions of things which echoed his own thoughts or feelings, it made all the difference and he worked feverishly, turning them into masterpieces. I remember his translating Paul Verlaine in a burst of enthusiasm like this -- L'Art poétique was after all an expression of his own beliefs about poetry.^[10]

In 1964, French singer Léo Ferré set to music fourteen poems from Verlaine (Écoutez la chanson bien douce, Il patinait merveilleusement, Mon rêve familier, Soleils couchants, L'espoir luit (...), Art poétique, Pensionnaires, Âme, te souvient-il ?, Chanson d'automne, Green, Je vous vois encor, Ô triste, triste était mon âme, Clair de lune, Sérénade) along with Arthur Rimbaud in his album Léo Ferré chante Verlaine et Rimbaud. He also sang two other poems (Colloque sentimental, Si tu ne mourus pas) in his album On n'est pas sérieux quand on a 17 ans (1987). Since then other French singers regularly sing these "songs".

The time Verlaine and Rimbaud spent together was the subject of the 1995 film Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland and with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on his play. Verlaine was portrayed by David Thewlis and Leonardo DiCaprio played Rimbaud.

Bob Dylan, in his 1975 song "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," sings,

"Situations have ended sad

Relationships have all been bad

Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud."

The New Zealand band The Verlaines are named for Paul Verlaine. Their most notable song "Death and the Maiden" features in its lyrics Paul Verlaine, the shooting of Rimbaud, and repeats the word "Verlaine" numerous times. The song "Death and the Maiden" has also been covered by Steve Malkmus.

Works[link]

Verlaine's Complete Works are available in critical editions from the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Poetry portal

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Verlaine

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Paul Verlaine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Paul Verlaine

• Paul Verlaine at Find a Grave
• Works of Paul Verlaine at Project Gutenberg
• Free scores of works by Paul Verlaine in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• (French) Works by Paul Verlaine at Webnet
• (French) Works by Paul Verlaine in PDF at Livres et Ebooks
• (English) Resignation and Other Poems at New Translations
• La Nouvelle Décadence - Extensive online library of Verlaine translations and biographies
• Four poems by Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro, with original French texts

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2011)

Christiane Legrand (21 August 1930 – 1 November 2011^[1] ) was a French singer.

Legrand was born in Paris, the daughter of film composer Raymond Legrand, who wrote "Irma la Douce."

She studied piano and classical music from the time she was four. Jazz critic and composer André Hodeir discovered her in 1957, and she became the lead singer in the most notable French jazz vocal groups of the 1960s, including Les Double Six.^[2]

She was the original lead soprano of the Swingle Singers and was the vocalist who dubbed the part of Madame Emery in Les parapluies de Cherbourg, the music for which was composed by her brother Michel Legrand. She also sang the part of Judith in his Les demoiselles de Rochefort.

Christiane did the French dubbing for the title role of Disney's film Mary Poppins (1964) and lent her talents to numerous other film projects.

Christiane was the featured soprano on the track "Fires (Which Burn Brightly)" on the 1973 Procol Harum album Grand Hotel. Her niece Victoria Legrand is a member of the American indie rock group Beach House.

References[link]

1. ^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/11/oh-no-another-swingle-dies.html
2. ^ Biography on comufra.com

• Christiane Legrand on IMDB

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