Brother John and I have been writing and publishing books (something like 25 volumes apiece) for some forty years. We've both been lucky enough to have had some fine reviews from some fine reviewers. I have a vast Maisie Fielding scrapbook full of mine, from the London years ...
But things are different in the 2020s, and any type of review is hard to come by, much less a really authoritative and knowledgeable one. But the pillars of informed criticism still exist -- if you can get them to notice you -- and at the head of the list of pillars comes the Times Literary Supplement.
Now the TLS isn't going to bother with yet another theatre book by Gänzl, K. He may be turning out all sort of original research, but he's old news. And he doesn't take 21st century fashionable angles on his subject manner. No politics, no feminism, no homosexuality ...
And as for Gallas, J, his slim volumes of exquisite and/or hilarious poetry ... well, for all that his first volume was called Practical Anarchy ...
But put the brothers together, the punctilious historian and the poet ... and .... this was the result.
And this one caught the eye ... and this was the result ... a TLS notice from scholar Sarah-Jane Zubair:
“The metal that boils in the crucible must fling forth its slag: the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross – / Behold!” Petrus Borel’s preface does not open Rhapsodies (1831) so much as kick the door in. His promise of molten dynamism is fulfilled on every page: his poetics seethe and snarl in a manner befitting a self-described “Lycanthrope” (a moniker, John Gallas explains, that Borel invoked to reflect his “own opinion of his powers and desire to attack conventional society, tyrants, Classicism, [and] traditionalism”). Nowhere does Borel seek a lofty, spiritualized sublime; rather, “poverty ever keeps my feet upon the earth”, and he takes aim at “barbarous luxury, whose aristocratic bent, whose ecclesiastical flummeries and sonnets-in-chains are like listening to hair-shirted hacks bum-branded with their armorials, clutching a rosary or a rattle in their fists”. His epilogue too is a wrathful catharsis: “Work! for howling Destitution baits / each thought that comes like hope in solitude. / What says my lute in answer? – only Food!”.
Yet Borel is not a one-note poet. Among his condemnations of institutions, corruption and an effete ruling class, there are tender lyrics such as “Benoni: lament for my brother”, with its haunting leitmotif (“He is sleeping, my Benoni”) and legato lullaby rhythm. Musical repetitions also appear in “The Olden Captain”, “The Baron’s Daughter” and “Thirst for Love”, which has a silky, crooning refrain: “Come quickly hither, pretty maid, / that on thy breast I may forget / my madness”. Even at his most amoroushe retains his gothic-Romantic bite: “Now you weep: and I am drunk with joy! / Your quiet sobs sugar my bittered heart, / and in the burning circle of your arms I choke with ecstasy!” (“The Ramparts”).
The poems are all rooted in bodily experience: only the faintest of movements beyond the corporeal occur, in the religiosity of poems such as “The Adventurer” and “Daydreams”, where he broods on death and mortality (“Tell me where the rotted trunk of the old oaktree goes – / it goes in smuts to fatten up the earth: and you, brave stump, / a monster by the name of God has held you for a later fate!”). And once, gazing at a beautiful woman in “At the Window”, the poet describes a moment of quasi- religious transport:
Ecstatic and intoxicate, no worldliness remains,
and through my weightless flesh my flooded soul
turns, drop by drop, to dew: and like the bright strings
of a silver lute that throbs beneath the hand
of some grace-leaning angel, all the earth trembles and dissolves.
The reader can almost hear Le Lycanthrope licking his fangs as he tears through everything from records of moonlit trysts to invectives against perceived injustice (“To the Court that Proposed the Abolition of the Death Penalty”; “On the Wounds of the Institute”). In “Patriots”he relishes scenes of revolution: “The night is done, and dawn is near, / so quick, ye dogs, lickspittles, rats, / bring forth your hunting horns, your hounds – / the Devil wants more blood!”
Borel’s verse is fiery and has a strong musical pulse. It is perplexing and regrettable that Rhapsodies and his prose fiction did not establish him as an important literary voice during his lifetime. Appreciation of his work seems to have been limited to his bohemian social circle (which included Théophile Gautier), posthumous acknowledgements of his influence by Charles Baudelaire and André Breton, and a full-length biography by Enid Starkie in 1954. Yet two centuries on his voice has lost none of its revolutionary energy. It is refreshing today to encounter a collection that confronts its audience rather than grovelling for the reader’s admiration.
In translating these poems, Gallas and Kurt Gänzl have presented a reliquary of gems that glint and glare and burn, successfully evoking the energy of Borel’s verse. Produced through a two-step process of translating and “repoeming”, the book is a credit to Gallas’s poetic instinct, which colours and sculpts Gänzl’s initial translations. These translations may even rival the original French versions in verve and flourish. Perhaps Petrus Borel, who died in anonymity of heatstroke in Algeria, will finally have a more fortuitous moment in the sun."
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