Blog

• Looking for mistakes in Proust

  Posted on Jan 4, 2021
  Marcel Proust, Scheherazade by Konchalovsky When we launched the special lockdown blog back in March 2020 I undertook to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust in the C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin English translation. Nine months later and I am pleased to report that I have now completed the first of the three volumes, representing just over 1,000 pages. As well as reading the novel, I have also been catching up on some of the secondary literature about the author. The most recent addition to this is Proustian Uncertainties, a short book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Isra…

• Blogging in Lockdown – a review of the year

  Posted on Dec 29, 2020
  During what has been the strangest of years, the R&V blog has proved a great silver lining on an otherwise dark bank of clouds. I initially expected that these blogs would be read only by a handful of people, and that the response to them would therefore be muted. So, it has been wonderful to see the number of readers increasing every month, with some blogs attracting well over 300 substantive readers, many of them accessing the content online or via social media. Even better have been the many heart-warming messages from R&V members thanking us for the blogs, and telling us what a dif…

• Contemporary Decadence: Subversion and Social Consciousness

  Posted on Dec 15, 2020
  As established in Jane Desmarais and David Weir’s introduction to Decadence and Literature (2019), ‘decadence’ is a multidisciplinary critical concept that is relative to contemporary ideas about decline and decay. Discourse of decadence manifests most strongly at moments of unease about socio-historical transition and relates to extremes of taste, passing into the realms of the distasteful or the overly extravagant. Social decadence seemingly surrounds us in the West today, and the concept of decadence offers a way of understanding creative responses to contemporary anxieties over social, pol…

• An etching of Paul Verlaine by Anders Zorn

  Posted on Dec 8, 2020
  This time last year, before anyone dreamed of lockdowns, the AHRC-funded project, Decadence and Translation, led by myself and Stefano Evangelista, was drawing to a close. As part of our final event at the University of Glasgow, we were lucky enough to secure a visit to the storage facilities of the Hunterian Museum and Gallery at Kelvin Hall. I’ve written about this previously on the project website (here), where you can see some footage of our visit too. I thought I would take the opportunity of the anniversary of our visit to write a little more about the particular image that caught the ey…

• Lafcadio Hearn, Untranslatable Japan

  Posted on Dec 2, 2020
  We all know how crazy suddenly everyone became about Japan. After the country’s enforced opening to foreign trade in the 1850s, Japanese culture seduced the European artistic crowd, converting many literary figures into enthusiasts and collectors. Stunning Japanese prints, fabrics and netsuke were a novelty, they were relatively affordable, and they radiated sophistication and cultural ambition. Zola got himself painted by Manet with a Japanese print pinned on the wall. Painters’ models started wearing kimono and posing against the backdrop of decorated screens. Whistler made Chelsea look Japa…

• Literature and place: Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières and beyond

  Posted on Nov 25, 2020
  If you’re reading this, I’ll wager that you have made a trip to at least one place – perhaps many places – associated with a favourite writer. Maybe you’ve been to Shakespeare’s Birthplace, or one of the Maisons Victor Hugo in Paris or Guernsey, or the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. You might have visited a house with a blue plaque outside, or a statue or other monument commemorating a literary figure. Maybe you’ve even put on your best Regency glad rags for the Jane Austen festival in Bath. What are we doing, when we engage in these various different types of literary tourism, and what do we h…

• Getting away from Rimbaud in County Cork

  Posted on Nov 18, 2020
  About 5 years ago I went to Cork in Ireland for a long weekend of cycling. I had been working hard on something related to the charity and was looking forward to getting away from the French poets for a while. The cycling is quite tough. County Cork specialises in concave hills which seem to go up for ever without ever resolving themselves into a ridge. However, we were lucky with the weather. The countryside was washed in bright greens and the sun sparkled on the ridges of the ocean. One day we cycled out to Cobh (formerly Queenstown) where the coast road passes alongside the famous deep-wate…

• Arthur Rimbaud and King Menelik of Shoa

  Posted on Nov 11, 2020
  From 1875 onwards, Rimbaud completely gave up the practice of poetry, he became ‘a living amputee of poetry’, as Stéphane Mallarmé put it. Having left Europe, he crossed the Suez Canal and after looking for work ‘in all the ports of the Red Sea’, he disembarked in Aden in August 1880 and ended up hired by a coffee trading house, Mazeran, Viannay, Bardey & Co. From the end of November 1880 to December 1881, then from April 1883 to March 1884, he lived on the other side of the Red Sea, in the town of Harar, in Ethiopia – in what was then called Abyssinia.  In Harar Rimbaud worked for the sa…

• The Rest is Literature: In memoriam Derek Mahon

  Posted on Nov 3, 2020
  The Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon, who sadly passed away on 1 October 2020, was a great admirer of decadent and symbolist literature. I had coincidentally scheduled a lecture on Mahon’s poetry for the following week and, with great regret, was able to point my students toward the recent obituaries that provided an overview of Mahon’s life and work. Thinking about this blog, the lines that first leapt out to me, grimly, were from his ‘Rue des Beaux Arts’, a poem from Mahon’s 1997 volume The Yellow Book that weaves together a sympathetic portrait of Oscar Wilde’s last days exiled and destitu…

• Arthur Machen’s Decadent Ornaments

  Posted on Oct 27, 2020
  It being Halloween this seemed a good moment to consider decadence, magic, and the occult in the work of the Welsh writer and mystic Arthur Machen (1863-1947). For a marginal figure, he receives an extraordinary amount of attention. In part due to the efforts of The Friends of Arthur Machen, ‘a fellowship dedicated to celebrating Machen and his work’,1 he has remained in public consciousness since the 1980s, especially among fans of horror and weird fiction, and his short stories appear frequently in anthologies of supernatural fiction. However, in recent years Machen has entirely emerged fr…

• Rimbaud for sale

  Posted on Oct 21, 2020
  Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 Oct 1854 and died in 1891 at the age of only 37. Readers of this blog will be familiar with his many and sometimes unexpected influences on the arts and culture. However, intense interest in the poet’s trail-blazing and adventurous life has also been reflected in the prices paid for any books, manuscripts and artefacts plausibly associated with his short life. Several important lots, including a recently rediscovered letter and sketch depicting Rimbaud in London, are being auctioned at Christie’s in Paris on 3 Nov 2020. Perhaps surprisingly, it is not always the m…

• Total Eclipse: The lives of the poets

  Posted on Oct 14, 2020
  Just when you thought 2020 could not get any worse, some degenerate comes along and reminds you that this year marks the 25th anniversary of Total Eclipse (1995), Agnieszka Holland’s biopic about the gay antics of those morally incorrigible poetry pals, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The good news, I suppose, is that the pandemic has put the kibosh on all those festivities planned to celebrate the anniversary: the small-town parades, the ribbon-cuttings, the school pageants featuring children with water pistols re-enacting the famous 1873 shooting in Brussels, and so on. Information on thi…