Authors:Franca Bruera Pages: 7 - 12 Abstract: André Salmon has explored manyfold forms of writing over the span of an extremely long career, extending from the turn of the century – he started as a poet in 1903 – up to the post-WW II years. Salmon’s oeuvre encompasses poetry and prose writing, reaches out to theatre, memoir and art criticism, while embracing journalism in general. His polyphonic work deserves its place in the context of international modernism, especially when reconsidered in the light of recent archival research and the discovery of new documents. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6341
Authors:Peter Read Pages: 13 - 26 Abstract: André Salmon and Pablo Picasso enjoyed a close relationship from 1905 onwards and Salmon’s poetry and prose offer exceptionally clear-sighted responses to Picasso’s work. Writing as an insider and eye-witness, Salmon provides vivid insights and key information on individual works, but also identifies and highlights significant turning points in the artist’s development. Picasso cold-shouldered Salmon from 1935 to 1951, because of his journalistic activities. Once reconciled, they saw each other regularly in Sanary-sur-Mer and a late Picasso drawing indicates his interest in La Terreur noire, Salmon’s 1959 history of anarchism. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6342
Authors:Jacqueline Gojard, Alessandro Maras Pages: 27 - 42 Abstract: This article has two parts. In the first, Jacqueline Gojard studies the privileged relationship between poetry and song in the life and work of André Salmon (1881-1969). In the second, Alessandro Maras analyses the relationship between this poet and art music. Although he lived in a time of great musical revolutions, Salmon seems to have had nothing to do with the world of Stravinsky and Debussy, thus confirming and making explicit the attitude of many artists and poets in the context of the aesthetic paradigm shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6343
Authors:Alexander Dickow Pages: 43 - 56 Abstract: This article argues that André Salmon’s Prikaz (1919) mounts a virulent critique of pre-World War I aestheticism through an obsessive return to the idea of falsity – false appearances, inauthenticity, the counterfeit, and related leitmotive. On the one hand, the poem proposes itself as “mere” play, a carnival that’s all for show; on the other, this representational “fake” concerns real horrors and atrocities. Although Salmon explicitly suggests that he reserves all judgment with regard to the Revolution, the poem seems to demand that the reader judge for her own sake whether historical atrocities are an acceptable object for a playful, poeticized representation. In the wake of the historical trauma of World War I, the Revolution, and the Spanish flu, this voluntary ambiguity seems to tempt the reader to decide one way or the other – and it proves difficult not to condemn the pre-war aestheticism Salmon stages. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6345
Authors:Émilien Sermier Pages: 57 - 70 Abstract: Long marginalised by literary history, André Salmon’s novels contributed to the modernist and international renewal of the genre at the turn of the century. This article examines the ‘simultaneist’ composition of La Négresse du Sacré-Cœur (1920). While this ‘urban novel’ makes Montmartre the main enunciative subject of the text, it also redeploys the procedures of the ‘poem-conversation’ – as defined by Apollinaire – on the scale of the novel. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6346
Authors:Marilena Pronesti Pages: 71 - 88 Abstract: For years, several specialists have questioned the damnatio memoriae that has dogged the writer, poet and journalist, André Salmon, who, nevertheless, played an essential role in poetry and aesthetics, and was a considerable influence on the world of arts and letters during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this article, I propose a few different areas of research that help us trace the origin of this literary oblivion, which even today is difficult to understand. Tracking these clues, scattered over different sources—periodicals, books, or even court documents—I have reconstructed the contexts for the various reasons that André Salmon lost his rightful place (either large or small, time will tell) in the history of French letters. Thanks to the few but significant sentences written by Salmon in his memoirs, and above all, thanks to the courage of a small group of literary and art specialists on this common path, I have been able to find meaning in certain clues, strewn like pebbles in a fairytale, from the memories and commentaries dedicated to this author since the 1930s. It is an itinerary marked by a precise series of chronological steps that allow me today to better understand André Salmon the person and the strange fate of his literary career. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6347
Authors:Maria Dario Pages: 89 - 112 Abstract: This article aims to study the creative interferences between the newspaper, considered as an aesthetical model, a textual support and a media vehicle and André Salmon poetic work’s from Les Féeries (1907) to the after war poetical cycle (Prikaz, L’Age de l’Humanité, Peindre). After having sketched out the features of “lyrisme du quotidien” conceived in the first phase of his poetic work, I will focus more specifically on the great post-war epics, where Salmon develops a new poetic form, the “poem-reportage”, capable of expressing “le climat instable de l’inquiétude universelle”. The poème-reportage proposes a redefinition of poetry that, by accepting the risks of confrontation with the referential, gives it the means to reappropriate its function of privileged intermediary with the world. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6348
Authors:Jacqueline Gojard Pages: 113 - 121 Abstract: This article, based on correspondence and various exchanges, tells the story of an undying friendship between two poet-brothers: Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. This story has indeed continued well beyond the death of Guillaume, November 9, 1918. This is evidenced by a posthumous dialogue with the lost friend, maintained by the author of Souvenirs sans fin, who died on March 12, 1969. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6344
Authors:Benoît Monginot Pages: 123 - 130 Abstract: For Mallarmé, chance can be defined as an ontological and anthropological fact, but the poet’s originality lies in the fact that he also defines chance as a quasi-transcendental modal category that conditions and allows every symbolic production. This implies that to abolish chance (the oft-stated project of Mallarméan poetics) is the same of performing chance itself: this proposition surprisingly situates Mallarméan poetics in relation to the chance it plans to abolish and allows us to understand the paradoxical meaning of the negation envisaged. Such an attempted negation forms a system with a set of strategies that aim to signal the contingent status of the poem. It is thus part of a pedagogy aimed to fight the illusionary wanderings of the language, while at the same time laying the foundations of a poetics of the performativity which initiates a deep change in the conceptions of what poetry is or can accomplish. PubDate: 2021-12-24 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6359
Authors:Matteo Bafico Pages: 131 - 144 Abstract: The paper, based on unpublished private documents, aims to reconstruct the editorial history of the French translation of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. The reconstruction was carried out starting from the letters Gadda, François Wahl and Louis Bonalumi exchanged between 1958 and 1963: the study of these has allowed us to open a glimpse of the complex work that was carried out for five years around the Pasticciaccio and which was at the origin of the engineer’s French fortune. The final aim of this article is, on the one hand, to bring to light and study archival sources of extraordinary value and, on the other, to provide new elements on the translation and diffusion of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s work in France. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6350
Authors:Vanessa Pietrantonio Pages: 145 - 158 Abstract: The essay intends to consider the letters written by Rilke to his wife Clara Westhoff on the occasion of the two rooms dedicated to Cézanne in the Salon d’Automne exhibition held in Paris (where Rilke was staying at the time) in 1907. These letters are a sort of account of Rilke’s almost daily visits to the exhibition. The encounter with Cézanne’s painting has the value, for Rilke, of a real event which, in absolute harmony with the painter, allows him to become definitively aware of the metamorphosis that had been taking place for some time in his literary creation. The call, made by Cézanne, to represent the sensitive universe starting from the modalities through which it appears crosses, in fact, with the apprenticeship towards a new way of seeing “things” chosen by Rilke – in the New Poems and in the Notebooks of Malte – as the privileged epicenter of his poetics, which will find, then, in the Duino Elegies its summit. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6351
Authors:Cristina Grandi Pages: 159 - 172 Abstract: This essay aims to retrace the history of Tanztheater, starting from the early 20th century, with the birth of free dance by the Hungarian master Rudolf Laban, to the contemporary Tanztheater later developed by the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. The first step of the analysis consists in identifying the common points on a technical and compositional level. Then, we examine the innovations, mainly methodological, brought and systematically adopted by Pina Bausch since 1977, with the choreographic composition of the pièce “Blaubart”. In conclusion, the essay proposes a reflection about the symbolic dimension of movement and dance, which can be considered the main element in establishing continuity between the free dance of Rudolf Laban and the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6352
Authors:Franca Franchi Pages: 173 - 186 Abstract: The imagery of cannibalism and its persistence over the centuries are investigated from an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective, which brings together Literature, visual Arts, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. Especially from Montaigne’s enlightening Des cannibales, and on till the 20th century, the anthropophagic motif, while combining repulsion and attraction, oscillates between the ancestral horror of its own dissolution and the pleasure of inescapable communion and appropriation. As a founding experience of initiation and metamorphosis, it declines the dynamics of critical-artistic-literary creation. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6353
Authors:Alessandro Grosso Pages: 189 - 197 Abstract: Published in 2020, Meizoz’s essay focuses on contemporary writers’ relationship with money and the media, two forces that play an increasingly decisive role in the crafting of literary works and their reception. After an initial theoretical section in which the author discusses current research on “literature outside the book” and the “literary industry”, the gaze shifts to a series of case studies illustrating the postural differences between writers who choose “success” and those who choose “prestige”: on the one hand, public notoriety ensured by large sales volumes and media presence; on the other hand, peer appreciation, wich is the only source of lasting “consecration”. This review retraces the structure of the text and provides a comprehensive evaluation of it. PubDate: 2021-12-23 DOI: 10.13135/2281-6658/6349
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