Louis Aragon

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Louis Aragon
an older white man wearing a dark suit stands in an interior in front of bookshelves and a painting
Portrait of Aragon, before 1982.
Born(1897-10-03)3 October 1897
Paris, France
Died24 December 1982(1982-12-24) (aged 85)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Notable worksLes Lettres françaises, Pour un réalisme socialiste

Louis Aragon (French:

Littérature.[1][2][3] He was also a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt. After 1959, he was a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4]

Early life (1897–1939)

Portrait of Louis Aragon by Man Ray, half-tone print.

Louis Aragon was born in Paris. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister and foster mother, respectively. His biological father,

First World War, from which neither he nor his parents believed he would return. Andrieux's refusal or inability to recognize his son would influence Aragon's poetry later on.[citation needed
]

Having been involved in Dadaism from 1919 to 1924, he became a founding member of Surrealism in 1924,[7] with André Breton and Philippe Soupault, under the pen-name "Aragon".[8] In 1923, during the trial of Germaine Berton, Aragon released a 29 portrait piece in La Révolution surréaliste in support of her stating Berton "“use terrorist means, in particular murder, to safeguard, at the risk of losing everything, what seems to her— rightly or wrongly — precious beyond anything in the world”.[9]

In the 1920s, Aragon became a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party (PCF) along with several other surrealists, and joined the Party in January 1927.[10]

In 1933, he began to write for the party's newspaper, L'Humanité, in the "news in brief" section. He would remain a member for the rest of his life, writing several political poems including one to Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the PCF. During the First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (1935), Aragon opposed his former friend André Breton, who wanted to use the opportunity as a tribune to defend the writer Victor Serge, associated with Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition.[6]

Aragon was also critical of the

denounced by Nikita Khrushchev
.

The French surrealists had long claimed Lewis Carroll as one of their own, and Aragon published his translation of The Hunting of the Snark[11] in 1929, "shortly before he completed his transition from Snarxism to Marxism", as Martin Gardner puts it.[12] Witness the key stanza of the poem in Aragon's translation:

Ils le traquèrent avec des gobelets ils le traquèrent avec soin

Ils le poursuivirent avec des fourches et de l'espoir
Ils menacèrent sa vie avec une action de chemin de fer

Ils le charmèrent avec des sourires et du savon

Gardner, who calls the translation "pedestrian" and deems the rest of Aragon's writings on Carroll's nonsense poetry full of factual errors, says that there is no evidence that Aragon intended any of it as a joke.[citation needed]

The Commune (1933–1939)

Apart from working as a journalist for L'Humanité, Louis Aragon also became, along with

Spanish Republic.[citation needed
]

Director of Ce soir (1937–1953)

In March 1937, Aragon was called on by the PCF to head the new evening daily

Emile Danoën
among its collaborators, closed in March 1953.

World War II (1939–1945)

In 1939, he married Russian-born author

muse starting in the 1940s. Aragon and Triolet collaborated in the left-wing French media before and during World War II, going underground for most of the German occupation.[5]

Aragon was mobilized in 1939, and awarded the

Croix de guerre (War Cross) and the military medal for acts of bravery. After the May 1940 defeat, he took refuge in the Southern Zone. He was one of several poets, along with René Char, Francis Ponge, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Jean Prévost, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, etc., to join the Resistance
, both through literary activities and as an actual organizer of Resistance acts.

Otto Abetz was the German governor, and produced a series of "black lists" of authors forbidden to be read, circulated or sold in Nazi Occupied France. These included anything written by a Jew, a communist, an Anglo-Saxon or anyone else who was anti-Germanic or anti-fascist. Aragon and André Malraux were both on these "Otto Lists" of forbidden authors.[15]

During the war, Aragon wrote for the underground press

National Front Resistance movement. His poetry was published along texts by Vercors (Jean Bruller), Pierre Seghers or Paul Eluard in Switzerland in 1943 after being smuggled out of occupied France by his friend and publisher François Lachenal.[16]

He participated with his wife in the setting up of the National Front of Writers in the Southern Zone. This activism led him to break his friendly relationship with

Collaborationism
.

Along with Paul Éluard,

Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée
(FTP-MOI).

The theme of the poem was the Red Poster affair, mainly the last letter that Missak Manouchian, an Armenian-French poet and Resistant, wrote to his wife Mélinée before his execution on 21 February 1944.[17] This poem was then set to music by Léo Ferré.

After the war

At the Liberation, Aragon became one of the leading Communist intellectuals, assuming political responsibilities in the

Titoist regime in Yugoslavia.[citation needed
]

Sponsored by Thorez, Aragon was elected, in 1950, to the central committee of the PCF. His post, however, did not protect him from all forms of criticism. Thus, when his journal Les Lettres françaises published a drawing by

Stalinist repression by his Russian-born wife, and so his political line evolved.[citation needed
]

Les Lettres françaises (1953–1972)

In the days following the disappearance of Ce soir, in March 1953, Aragon became the director of L'Humanité's literary supplement,

May '68, although the PCF was sceptical about it. The crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 led him to a critical preface published in a translation of one of Milan Kundera's books (La Plaisanterie).[22] Despite his criticisms, Aragon remained an official member of the PCF's central committee until his death.[citation needed] In 1970, he supported the Nobel Prize awarded to Solzhenitsyn.[23]
The monetary loss caused by Les Lettres françaises led to its ceasing publication in 1972. It was later re-founded.

The publisher

Beside his journalistic activities, Louis Aragon was also CEO of the

Yánnis Rítsos or Vladimir Mayakovsky. At the beginning of the 1960s, the EFR brought to public knowledge the works of non-Russian Soviet writers, such as Chinghiz Aitmatov, or Russian writers belonging to the Khrushchev Thaw, such as Galina Nicolaëva, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Babi Iar in 1967, etc. The EFR also published the first novel of Christa Wolf in 1964, and launched the poetic collection Petite sirène, which collected works by Pablo Neruda, Eugène Guillevic, Nicolás Guillén, but also less known poets such as Dominique Grandmont, Alain Lance or Jean Ristat
.

Back to surrealism

Free from both his marital and editorial responsibilities (having ended publication of Les Lettres FrançaisesL'Humanité's literary supplement – in 1972), Aragon was free to return to his surrealist roots. During the last ten years of his life, he published at least two further novels: Henri Matisse Roman and Les Adieux.

Louis Aragon died on 24 December 1982, his friend Jean Ristat sitting up with him. He was buried in the parc of Moulin de Villeneuve, in his property of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, alongside his wife Elsa Triolet.[24]

He was and still is a popular poet in France because many of his poems have been set to music and sung by various composers and singers: Lino Léonardi, Hélène Martin, Léo Ferré (the first one to dedicate an entire LP to Aragon, with his 1961 breakthrough Les Chansons d'Aragon album), Jean Ferrat, Georges Brassens, Alain Barrière, Isabelle Aubret, Nicole Rieu, Monique Morelli, Marc Ogeret, Marjo Tal, et al. Many of his poems put into music by Jean Ferrat have been translated into German by Didier Caesar (alias Dieter Kaiser) and are sung by his Duo.

Bibliography

Novels and short stories

Poetry

  • Le Musée Grévin, published under the pseudonym François la Colère by the
    Editions de Minuit
  • La Rose et le réséda
  • Feu de joie, 1919
  • Le Mouvement perpétuel, 1926
  • La Grande Gaîté, 1929
  • Persécuté persécuteur, 1930–1931
  • Hourra l'Oural, 1934
  • Le Crève-Cœur, 1941
  • Cantique à Elsa, 1942
  • Les Yeux d'Elsa, 1942
  • Brocéliande, 1942
  • Le Musée Grevin, 1943
  • Complainte de Robert le Diable, 1945
  • La Diane française, 1945
  • En étrange pays dans mon pays lui-même, 1945
  • Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur, 1948
  • Le Roman inachevé, 1956
  • Elsa, 1959
  • Les Poètes, 1960
  • Le Fou d'Elsa, 1963
  • Il ne m'est Paris que d'Elsa, 1964
  • Les Chambres, poème du temps qui ne passe pas, 1969
  • Demeure de Malkine, 1970

[5]

Essays

  • Une vague de rêves, 1924
  • Treatise on Style, 1928 (French: Traité du style)
  • Pour un réalisme socialiste, 1935

See also

References

  1. .
  2. ^ "Louis Aragon | French author". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 19 October 2020.
  3. ^ "Louis Aragon". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 19 October 2020.
  4. ^ "Nomination Archive". NobelPrize.org. 1 April 2020. Retrieved 22 March 2021.
  5. ^ a b c "Louis Aragon". Poetry Foundation. 19 October 2020. Retrieved 19 October 2020.
  6. ^ a b "Louis Aragon | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 19 October 2020.
  7. .
  8. .
  9. .
  10. ^ "INDEX OF HISTORIC COLLECTORS AND DEALERS OF CUBISM". www.metmuseum.org. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  11. ^ La Chasse au Snark, Pierre Seghers, Paris 1949
  12. ^ The Annotated Snark, edited by Martin Gardner, Penguin Books, 1974
  13. ^ "Commune | A Popular Magazine for a New Era of Revolution". Commune. Retrieved 20 April 2023.
  14. ^ "Elsa Triolet and Aragon". Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  15. ^ Moorehead, Caroline. 2011. A Train in Winter. Pages 21–22.
  16. .
  17. ^ Mélinée Manouchian: Manouchian, EFR, Paris 1954
  18. ^ https://www.google.com/books/edition/Historical_Dictionary_of_French_Literatu/wb9rEAAAQBAJ
  19. ^ https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Facts_on_File_Companion_to_World_Poe/lblcBR7uDoYC
  20. .
  21. .
  22. ^ French: « Et voilà qu'une fin de nuit, au transistor, nous avons entendu la condamnation de nos illusions perpétuelles... »
  23. JSTOR 40866341
    .
  24. .

Further reading

External links