Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Marceline Desbordes - Valmore ( born June 20, 1786 in Douai, † July 23, 1859 in Paris) was a French writer.

Marceline Desbordes was the daughter of a successful painter Félix Desbordes and his wife Catherine Lucas. Her childhood was marked by the difficult situation of the family, as her father was impoverished more and more by the turmoil of the French Revolution. To supplement the family's situation, her mother decided to pair it with a relative in Guadeloupe in the West Indies. Marked by yellow fever, she returned as a 16 -year-old, her mother died from the disease.

She devoted herself to the music and began a career as a singer and actress. The meeting with the Belgian- French composer André- Ernest- Modeste Grétry in 1805 earned her an engagement at the Komische Oper. 1813 she moved to the Théâtre de l' Odéon in Paris in 1815 and played at the Brussels La Monnaie theater. You first wrote himself for the stage, but was so unsuccessful.

From 1808 to 1810 she was in illegitimate relationship with Henri de Latouche, a common child, died in 1816. 1817 married her second husband, the actor Prosper Valmore Lanchantin, with whom she often appeared on stage. Influenced by the failures of their works for the stage, they had to be forced to publish their poems. Here, however, she had in 1819 with their debut tape already success. 1823, she returned to the stage and created the back up to their end of life in careful work and intervals of several years more volumes of poetry. After she lost three of her children with Lanchantin Valmore, as nearly all the other relatives and many friends, she took her own life in Paris in 1859.

Her works (especially books of poetry ) show Desbordes - Valmores as an extraordinarily kind, sensitive woman with a big loving heart, but also with disturbing breaks in her own eventful life. Their topics range from motherhood - she as almost the only poet poetic opened up - about love, friendship, childhood, God up to protests against social oppression (eg, the silk weavers of Lyon 1831/1834 ). Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine ( Arthur Rimbaud pointed at them ) admired the sincerity, musicality and immediacy of their poetry. It has been defined as the greatest poet of France in the nineteenth century.

Works (selection)

  • Elegies et romances (1819, Elegies and Romances )
  • Elegies et Poésies nouvelles (1825, elegies and new poetry )
  • Poésies inedites (1830, New Poetry )
  • Les pleurs (1833, The Tears)
  • Pauvres fleurs (1839, arms flowers)
  • Bouquets et prières (1843, bouquets and prayers )
  • Poésies inedites (1860 posthumously, Unpublished poems)

Translations into German:

  • Stefan Zweig, Marceline Desbordes - Valmore. The life image of a poet (1927, contains a selection of poems, letters and auto biograph. Fragments )
  • Marceline Desbordes - Valmore: The first love / Le premier amour. Selected Poems (French / German ) Vorw and translated by Karl Schwedhelm. ISBN 3-89086-812-6
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