Paul Valéry

Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry ( born October 30, 1871 in Sète, Languedoc -Roussillon, † July 20, 1945 in Paris) was a French poet, philosopher and essayist.

Life

After his childhood in the small southern French port city of Sète, the son of a senior official Valéry spent his youth in Montpellier, where he studied also the Jura. Early on, he began to write poems. In 1894 he went to Paris, where he and especially Stéphane Mallarmé met André Gide, who became his role model. 1896/97 he worked for a news agency in London. In 1897 he was hired as an editor at the War Department, where he had a long study of the expanding German economy anfertigte among others. He then worked briefly at the news agency Agence Havas. In 1900 he was private secretary to a business tycoon, until he could later live by his income as a freelance writer. In the same year he married Jeannie Gobillard, a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. From this marriage the children Claude, Agathe, and François emerged.

Around 1920 was Valéry as the greatest French poets of his time and enjoyed high reputation in the rest of intellectual Europe. This year, his eight -year-long deep friendship and intellectual relationship with the poet Catherine Pozzi (1884-1934), put their diaries about detailed testimony began. In 1923 he was appointed Chevalier de la Légion d' honneur ( Knight of the Legion of Honor that is ), 1931 appointed Commander and Grand Officer in 1938. In 1925 he was admitted to the Académie française, which he was president temporarily. 1937 Valéry was awarded a well- endowed Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France.

In the time of the occupation of France by German and Italian troops, Valéry refused to cooperate with the occupation authorities. When he the obituary for " the Jews Henri Bergson " wrote this text and the denial of his cooperation cost him the position of president of the Académie française.

After his death, Charles de Gaulle ordered a state funeral. Valéry was buried according to his wishes in his hometown of Sète in the Cimetière marin, he had sung in a poem. In Sète is also a small - Valéry Museum.

Valéry was probably the last writer in France who could earn a living from poetry. He had the status of a poet, who was greeted with well-paid commissions from publishers and magazines and often invited to give lectures and readings. According to him, a whole century in France so successful poetry plummeted to a genus of rather marginal importance.

Creation

The lyrical work

In addition to some shorter, often difficult to classify literary texts Valéry wrote mainly poetry. With this he was initially close to the Symbolists. Later, after a lengthy creative crisis, he sought a " pure poetry " ( poésie pure ), which attempts to unite by sacrificing representation of feelings or outer realities mental precision and formal perfection. The symbol of this hermetic, purely self-referential poetry Narcissus was the Valéry the famous poem Narcisse parle ( Narcissus speaks ) devoted.

Other major works are his lyric La jeune Parque ( The Young Fates, 1917) and the poetry collection Charmes (1922, dt "magic " or " enchantments "), which in 1925 was translated into German by Rainer Maria Rilke. The latter includes, among others, the famous poem Le Cimetière marin ( The Graveyard by the sea, 1920), the cemetery of his birthplace Sète describes ( on which he also was buried later) and a shaft similar extensive long poems triggered not only in France.

The philosophical work

Valéry wrote numerous essays on political, cultural, literary theory, critical and historical as well as aesthetic and philosophical themes. He is regarded as so important French philosophical writer of the 20th century. Became well-known in addition to his narcissist reception, the fictional character Monsieur Teste (Fr. tête for "head" and the Latin for testis "witness" ), one to his intellect conscious observer and creator of the world: " Stupidity is not my strong point. "

More comprehensive than its printed during his lifetime philosophical writings are the posthumously published Cahiers (ie books ) in which Valéry a lifetime listed day -to-day thoughts and epistemological considerations.

Works (selection)

• Jürgen Schmidt- Radefeldt (ed.): works. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1989/95

• Cahiers / Notebooks in six volumes ( thematically ), edited by H. Köhler and J. Schmidt- Radefeldt, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main
• I browse from my brain meadow. Paul Valéry and his hidden Cahiers, on the basis of worried by H. Köhler and J. Schmidt- Radefeldt German edition of Cahiers / Notebooks in six volumes, selected and with an essay by Thomas Stolzel, The other library, Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011 ISBN 978-3-8218-6242-2
• Vaudeville ( 1.1924 - 4.1944 )
• Eupalinos ou l' architecte (1923 )
• Charmes ou poèmes (1922 )
• La jeune parque (1917 )
• Monsieur Teste (1926 )
• Mon Faust ( fragmentary play )
• Amphion. Melodrame ( ballet - oratorio ). Music ( 1929): Arthur Honegger. UA 1931
• Sémiramis. Melodrame ( ballet - oratorio ). Music (1933 /34): Arthur Honegger