Georges Schéhadé

Georges Schehadé (2 November 1905 – 17 January 1989) was a Lebanese playwright and poet writing in French.

Life and career

Georges Schehadé was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into an aristocratic Lebanese Greek Orthodox family that originated in the Hauran region of Syria.^[1] He spent most of his life in Beirut, Lebanon. His sister was the novelist, Laurice Schehadé. He studied law at the American University of Beirut and became a general secretary at the Ecole Supérieure de Lettres in 1945.

In 1930,

The year before Georges Vitaly produced Schehadé's first play, Monsieur Bob'le, at the Théâtre de la Huchette, and it got very controversial reviews. Most critics didn't like it at all but several poets and actors – amongst them André Breton, René Char, Georges Limbour, Benjamin Péret, Henri Pichette and Gérard Philipe – were very fond of it and wrote a couple of articles in Le Figaro Littéraire.

In 1954,

From 1960 to 1965, Schehadé wrote three other plays, Les Violettes (1960), Le Voyage (1961) and L'Emigré de Brisbane (1965) that entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in 1967. It was his last play.

In 1985, after a long period of silence, Georges Schehadé published his last book of poetry, Le Nageur d'un seul amour, a collection of poems he had written between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. He died on 17 January 1989 in

Georges Schehadé was mentioned to have influenced Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Taleb's youth, mentioned the postface of The Bed of Procrustes.

Works

Poetry

• Étincelles, Edition de la Pensée latine, Paris 1928
• Poésies I, GLM, Paris 1938
• Poésies II, GLM, Paris 1948
• Poésies III, GLM, Paris 1949
• Poésies Zéro ou L'Écolier Sultan (written in 1928/29), GLM, Paris 1950
• Si tu rencontres un ramier (later called Poésies IV), GLM, Paris 1951
• Les Poésies (Poésie I–IV), Gallimard, Paris 1952, reprinted in paperback edition Poésie/Gallimard 1969, 2001 and 2009
• Poésies V (1972)
• Le Nageur d'un seul amour (= Poésies VI), Gallimard, Paris 1985
• Poésies VII (last poems), Editions Dar An-Nahar, Beyrouth 1998

Plays

• Monsieur Bob'le, Gallimard, Paris 1951
• La Soirée des proverbes, Gallimard, Paris 1954
• Histoire de Vasco, Gallimard, Paris 1956
• Les Violettes, Gallimard, Paris 1960
• Le Voyage, Gallimard, Paris 1961
• L'Émigré de Brisbane, Gallimard, Paris 1965
• L'Habit fait le prince (written in 1957), pantomime, Gallimard, Paris 1973

Other works

• Rodogune Sinne ("novel", published in 1942, 1947; written in 1929)
• Goha (screenplay), 1958
• Anthologie du vers unique, Ramsay, Paris 1977

References

External links

• Georges Schehadé in IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine)
• The Story of Vasco, latest production in UK