Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard | |
|---|---|
 Éluard c. 1945 | |
| Born | Eugène Émile Paul Grindel 14 December 1895 Saint-Denis, France |
| Died | 18 November 1952 (aged 56) Charenton-le-Pont, France |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | École Supérieure de Colbert |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Surrealism |
| Notable works | Liberté |
| Spouse | Dominique Lemort
(m. 1951) |
| Children | 1 |
| Signature | |
 | |
Paul Éluard (French: [elɥar]), born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel ([ɡʁɛ̃dɛl]; 14 December 1895 – 18 November 1952), was a French poet and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement.[1]
In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, a matronymic borrowed from his maternal grandmother. He adhered to
During World War II, he was the author of several poems against Nazism that circulated clandestinely. He became known worldwide as The Poet of Freedom and is considered the most gifted of French surrealist poets.
Biography
Éluard was born in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, the son of Eugène Clément Grindel and wife Jeanne-Marie née Cousin. His father was an accountant when Paul was born but soon opened a real-estate agency. His mother was a seamstress. Around 1908, the family moved to Paris, rue Louis Blanc. Éluard attended the local school in Aulnay-sous-Bois, before obtaining a scholarship to attend the École Supérieure de Colbert. At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis, interrupted his studies, and remained hospitalized until April 1914 in the Clavadel sanatorium near Davos.
There he met a young Russian girl of his age, Helena Diakonova, whom he nicknamed
In April 1914, Éluard and Gala were both declared healthy again and sent home, to Paris and Moscow respectively. The separation was brutal; soon Europe was on the brink of war and Éluard was mobilised. He passed his physical and was assigned to the auxiliary services because of his poor health. He suffered from migraine, bronchitis, cerebral anaemia, and chronic appendicitis and spent most of 1915 under treatment in a military hospital not far from home. Éluard's mother came to visit him and he talked for hours about his beloved, opening his heart to her and slowly rallying her to his cause. Her initial hostility towards Gala slowly faded away, and she started calling her "the little Russian". However, Éluard's father, who had also been mobilized, remained adamant that she could not come to Paris.
In Moscow, Gala listened to no one. Her love for Éluard gave her an unshakable faith that they would be reunited again. She wrote to his mother to befriend her and finally convinced her stepfather to let her go to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne. She took a boat to Helsinki, then reached Stockholm before embarking for England. Once in London, she took a train to Southampton before taking a boat to Dieppe, and finally took a train to Paris.
In June 1916, Éluard was sent to Hargicourt to work in one of the military evacuation hospitals, 10 kilometers from the front line. The 'poet' was given a chair, a desk, and a pen to painfully write to the families of the dead and the wounded. He wrote more than 150 letters a day. At night, he dug graves to bury the dead. For the first time since Clavadel, shaken by the horrors of the war, he started writing verses again. Gala wrote to him: "I promise you our life will be glorious and magnificent."
On 14 December 1916, Éluard turned 21 and wrote to his mother: "I can assure you, that your approval will be infinitely precious to me. However, for all our sake, nothing will change my mind." He married Gala on 20 February 1917. However, he announced to his parents and newlywed wife that when he returned to the front line, he would voluntarily join the "real soldiers" in the trenches. Gala protested and threatened to return to Russia to become a nurse on the Russian front. But nothing would do, and for the first time, Éluard resisted her. "Let me live a tougher life," he wrote her, "less like a servant, less like a domestic." Two days after getting married, Éluard left for the front line.
There, living conditions were severe. Éluard wrote to his parents, "Even the strongest are falling. We advanced 50 kilometres, three days without bread or wine." His health suffered. On 20 March 1917, he was sent to a military hospital with incipient pleurisy.
On 11 May 1918, Gala gave birth to a baby girl who was eventually named Cécile (died 10 August 2016).
In 1919, Éluard wrote to Gala: "War is coming to an end. We will now fight for happiness after having fought for Life". Waiting to be sent home, he published "Duty and Anxiety" and "Little Poems for Peace". Following the advice of his publisher, he sent the poems to various personalities of the literary world who took a stand against the war. Gala helped him to prepare and send the letters. In 1919, Jean Paulhan, an eminent academic and writer, responded to his letter expressing his admiration. He referred him to three young writers who had started a new journal called Literature. He encouraged Éluard to go and meet them.
The three young poets Paulhan recommended to Éluard were André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon.
The meeting with Éluard took place in March 1919. Éluard was intimidated. He was shy and blushing. He was still a soldier and wearing his war uniform. It was the best omen for the three poets, who all showed great courage during the war. Éluard brought with him his poems and read them to the "jury". They were seduced by the young man and liked his work. They decided to publish one of his texts in the next edition of Littérature.
Wounded and scarred by the war,[
In November 1921, Éluard and Gala visited Max Ernst at his home in Cologne. Éluard had an immediate and an absolute sympathy for Max. Underneath the charm, Ernst, like Éluard, was a man deeply revolted, in total rupture with society. Unlike Éluard, however, Ernst remained indifferent to propagating this revolt which he considered to be an intimate 'elegance'.
Éluard and Gala moved to a house just outside Paris and were joined by Max Ernst, who entered France illegally, using Éluard's passport. Jean Paulhan once more helped Éluard by providing Ernst with fake
Éluard, depressed, wrote "Dying of not Dying". On 24 March 1924, he disappeared. No one knew where he was. The night before, he had had a worrisome meeting with Louis Aragon, during which Éluard confessed that he wanted to put an end to a present that tortured him. For his friends, he was gone forever. But Éluard wrote to Gala and four months later, she bought a ticket to go and find him and bring him back, locating him in
Éluard supported the Moroccan Revolution, as early as 1925, and in January 1927, he joined the French Communist Party together with Aragon, Breton, Benjamin Péret, and Pierre Unik. All explained their decision in a collective document entitled Au grand jour. It was during these years that Éluard published two of his main works: Capitale de la douleur (1926) and L'Amour la Poésie (1929).
In 1928, he had another bout of tuberculosis and returned to the Clavadel sanatorium with Gala. It was their last winter together. Gala met Salvador Dalí soon after and remained with him for the rest of her life.
In 1934, Éluard married Nusch (Maria Benz), a music hall artist, whom he had met through his friends Man Ray and Pablo Picasso.
The period from 1931 to 1935 were among Éluard's happiest years. He was excluded from the French Communist Party. He travelled through Europe as an ambassador of the Surrealist movement. In 1936, in Spain, he learned of the Franquist counterrevolution, against which he protested violently. The following year, the bombing of Guernica inspired him to write the poem "Victory of Guernica". During these two terrible years for Spain, Éluard and Picasso were inseparable. The poet told the painter: "You hold the flame between your fingers and paint like a fire."
Mobilized in September 1939, he moved to Paris with Nusch after the
In 1943, together with Pierre Seghers, François Lachenal, and Jean Lescure, he assembled the texts of several poets of the Resistance in a controversial book called L'Honneur des poètes (The Honour of Poets).[4] Faced with oppression, the poets eulogised in it hope and freedom. In November 1943, Éluard found refuge in the mental asylum of Saint-Alban, headed by doctor Lucien Bonnafé, in which many resistants and Jews were hiding. At Libération, Éluard and Aragon were hailed as the great poets of the Resistance.[5]
On 28 November 1946, during a stay in Switzerland, Éluard learned of Nusch's sudden death from of stroke. Distraught, he became extremely depressed. Two friends, Alain and Jacqueline Trutat (for whom Éluard wrote Corps mémorable), gave him back the will to live.
His grief at the premature death of his wife Nusch in 1946 inspired the work Le temps déborde in 1947, as well as "De l'horizon à l'horizon de tous", which traced the path that led Éluard from suffering to hope.
The principles of peace, self-government, and liberty became his new passion. He was a member of the Congress of
He later eulogised Joseph Stalin in his political writings. He even wrote a poem for him.[6] Milan Kundera recalled that he was shocked to hear of Éluard's public approval of the hanging of Éluard's friend, the Prague writer Záviš Kalandra in 1950.[7]
Paul Éluard died from a heart attack on 18 November 1952 at his home, 52 avenue de Gravelle, in Charenton-le-Pont. His funeral was held at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and organized by the French Communist Party; the French government having refused to organise a national funeral for political reasons. A crowd of thousands spontaneously gathered in the streets of Paris to accompany his casket to the cemetery. That day, Robert Sabatier wrote: "the whole world was mourning".[citation needed]
Éluard's poetry collection L'Évidence Poétique Habitude de la Poésie was translated into Arabic and published in the Egyptian magazine Al Tatawwur in 1940.[8]
Works
- Premiers poèmes, 1913
- Le Devoir, 1916
- Le Devoir et l'Inquiétude, 1917, (Artist's book with one etching by André Deslignères)
- "Pour Vivre ici", 1918
- Les Animaux et leurs hommes, les hommes et leurs animaux, 1920
- Répétitions, 1922
- "L'Amoureuse", 1923
- "La courbe de tes yeux", 1924
- Mourir de ne pas mourir, 1924
- Au défaut du silence, 1925
- "Place du Tertre", 1925, peinture à l'huile
- "La Dame de carreau", 1926
- Capitale de la douleur, 1926
- Les Dessous d'une vie ou la Pyramide humaine, 1926
- L'Amour la Poésie, 1929
- Ralentir travaux, 1930, in collaboration with André Breton and René Char
- À toute épreuve, 1930
- "L'immaculée conception", 1930
- Défense de savoir, 1932
- La Vie immédiate, 1932
- La Rose publique, 1934
- Facile, 1935
- Les Yeux fertiles, 1936
- Quelques-uns des mots qui jusqu'ici m'étaient mystérieusement interdits, 1937
- L'Évidence Poétique Habitude de la Poésie, 1937[8]
- "Les Mains libres" in collaboration with Man Ray, 1938
- Cours naturel, 1938
- "La victoire de Guernica" 1938
- Donner à voir, 1939
- "Je ne suis pas seul", 1939
- "Le Livre ouvert" 1941
- Poésie et vérité 1942, 1942
- "Liberté", 1942
- Avis, 1943
- "Courage", 1943
- Les Sept poèmes d'amour en guerre, 1943
- Au rendez-vous allemand, 1944
- Poésie ininterrompue, 1946
- Le Cinquième Poème visible, 1947
- Notre vie, 1947
- À l'intérieur de la vue, 1947
- La Courbe de tes yeux, 1947
- Le temps déborde, 1947
- Ode à Staline, 1950
- Le Phénix, 1951
- Picasso, dessins, 1952
Selected translations into English
- Eluard, Paul; Kendall, Stuart (2007). Paul Eluard - Love, Poetry. Black Widow Press. OCLC 81252722. Bilingual edition of L'amour la poesie (1929). Includes Stuart Kendall's English translations and introduction.
Further reading
- Buckley, C. (translator) (1995). Shadows and Sun/Ombres et Soleil: Poems and Prose (1913–1952) by Paul Éluard.[9]
References
- ^ Paul Éluard at Poetry Foundation.
- ^ Bandeira, M. Itinerário de Pasárgada. 3rd edition. Rio de Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 1984.
- ^ Simon, Michel (1965). Manuel Bandeira. Etude, choix de textes et bibliographie. Dessins, portraits, fac-similés. Paris: Seghers. p. 6.
- ISBN 9783125915848.
- ^ "À Saint-Alban (Lozère)". Samuel Huet. 18 September 2000. Retrieved 11 July 2020.
- ^ "Staline, L'homme que nous aimons le plus", pileface.com
- ^ Carlisle, Olga. "A Talk with Milan Kundera". Retrieved 7 January 2014.
Poetry is another of those values unassailable in our society. I was shocked when, in 1950, the great French Communist poet Paul Eluard publicly approved the hanging of his friend, the Prague writer, Zavis Kalandra. When Brezhnev sends tanks to massacre the Afghans, it is terrible, but it is, so to say, normal - it is to be expected. When a great poet praises an execution, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world.
- ^ .
- ISBN 0-9617481-7-6.
External links
- Official website (in French)
- Nusch, portrait d'une muse du Surréalisme Biography of Nusch Éluard (in French)
- Petri Liukkonen. "Paul Éluard". Books and Writers.
- La terre est bleue...
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