Poetry Wednesday 09/30/09: The Afternoon Of A Faun

Portrait of Stephane Mallarme, 1876
By Édouard Manet
Musee d’Orsay
Oil on canvas

Introduction: The Afternoon of a Faun is Stéphane Mallarmé’s most well-known poem. In slightly more than a hundred lines, it presents the dreamlike erotic reveries of a faun—a mythical creature of classical legend that, like the satyr, has a combination of animal features (such as horns and goatlike feet) and human features.

The poem opens with the faun becoming excited by two nymphs; he is disoriented, however, having just awakened. Finding himself alone, he realizes that the nymphs must have existed only in his dream.

This is probably Debussy’s best-known orchestral work. It was inspired by the poem of Stephane Mallarme, evoking a pagan landscape in which the faun–a mythological creature of the forest who is half man, half goat–awakes in the woods and tries to remember: Was he visited by three lovely nymphs or was this but a dream? He will never know. The sun is warm, the earth fragrant. He curls himself up and falls into a wine-drugged sleep.

Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky, 1912 in the Ballet “Afternoon of a Faun”
By Leon Bakst

Leon Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume- designer who revolutionized the arts he worked in. Leon was born as Lev (Leib) Rosenberg in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. He studied in St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a noncredit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.

After the end of the decade of the 1900s, Bakst worked mostly as a stage-designer. Bakst designed settings for Greek tragedies, and in 1908 made a name as a scene-painter for Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes (Cleopatra 1909, Shakherezada 1910, Carnaval 1910, Narcissus 1911, Daphnis et Chloé 1912). All that time he lived in Europe because as a Jew he did not have the right to live permanently outside the Pale of Settlement.

During his visits to Saint Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva’s school. One of his students was Marc Chagall (1908-1910). Bakst advised Chagall not to go to Paris as, according to Bakst, it would be harmful for Chagall’s art and financially would probably cause him to die of starvation. Chagall moved there anyway, did not die and actually found his style.

THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN, 1876
By Stéphane Mallarmé
Translation from French by Roger Fry

These nymphs I would perpetuate
So clear
Their light carnation, that it floats in the air
Heavy with tufted slumbers.

Was it a dream I loved?
My doubt, a heap of ancient night, is finishing
In many a subtle branch, which, left the true
Wood itself, proves, alas! that all alone I gave
Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.
Let me reflect . . .

if the girls of which you tell
Figure a wish of your fabulous senses!
Faun, the illusion escapes from the blue eyes
And cold, like a spring in tears, of the chaster one:
But, the other, all sighs, do you say she contrasts
Like a breeze of hot day in your fleece!
But no! through the still, weary faintness
Choking with heat the fresh morn if it strives,
No water murmurs but what my flute pours
On the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind
Prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before
It scatters the sound in a waterless shower,
Is, on the horizon’s unwrinkled space,
The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.

Oh you, Sicilian shores of a calm marsh
That more than the suns my vanity havocs,
Silent beneath the flowers of sparks, RELATE
‘That here I was cutting the hollow reeds tamed
By talent, when on the dull gold of the distant
Verdures dedicating their vines to the springs,
There waves an animal whiteness at rest:
And that to the prelude where the pipes first stir
This flight of swans, no! Naiads, flies
Or plunges . . .’

Inert, all burns in the fierce hour
Nor marks by what art all at once bolted
Too much hymen desired by who seeks the Ia:
Then shall I awake to the primitive fervour,
Straight and alone, ‘neath antique floods of light,
Lilies and one of you all through my ingenuousness.

As well as this sweet nothing their lips purr,
The kiss, which a hush assures of the perfid ones,
My breast, though proofless, still attests a bite
Mysterious, due to some august tooth;
But enough! for confidant such mystery chose
The great double reed which one plays ‘neath the blue:
Which, the cheek’s trouble turning to itself
Dreams, in a solo long, we might amuse
Surrounding beauties by confusions false
Between themselves and our credulous song;
And to make, just as high as love modulates,
Die out of the everyday dream of a back
Or a pure flank followed by my curtained eyes,
An empty, sonorous, monotonous line.

Try then, instrument of flights, oh malign
Syrinx, to reflower by the lakes where you wait for me!
I, proud of my rumour, for long I will talk
Of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous,
From their shades unloose yet more of their girdles:
So when of grapes the clearness I’ve sucked,
To banish regret by my ruse disavowed,
Laughing, I lift the empty bunch to the sky,
Blowing into its luminous skins and athirst
To be drunk, till the evening I keep looking through.

Oh nymphs, we diverse MEMORIES refill.
‘My eye, piercing the reeds, shot at each immortal
Neck, which drowned its burning in the wave
With a cry of rage to the forest sky;
And the splendid bath of their hair disappears
In the shimmer and shuddering, oh diamonds!
I run, when, there at my feet, enlaced. lie
(hurt by the languor they taste to be two)
Girls sleeping amid their own casual arms;
them I seize, and not disentangling them, fly
To this thicket, hated by the frivilous shade,
Of roses drying up their scent in the sun
Where our delight may be like the day sun-consumed.‘
I adore it, the anger of virgins, the wild
Delight of the sacred nude burden which slips
To escape from my hot lips drinking, as lightning
Flashes! the secret terror of the flesh:
From the feet of the cruel one to the heart of the timid
Who together lose an innocence, humid
With wild tears or less sorrowful vapours.
‘My crime is that I, gay at conquering the treacherous
Fears, the dishevelled tangle divided
Of kisses, the gods kept so well commingled;
For before I could stifle my fiery laughter
In the happy recesses of one (while I kept
With a finger alone, that her feathery whiteness
Should be dyed by her sister’s kindling desire,
The younger one, naive and without a blush)
When from my arms, undone by vague failing,
This pities the sob wherewith I was still drunk.‘

Ah well, towards happiness others will lead me
With their tresses knotted to the horns of my brow:
You know, my passion, that purple and just ripe,
The pomegranates burst and murmur with bees;
And our blood, aflame for her who will take it,
Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire.
At the hour when this wood’s dyed with gold and with ashes
A festival glows in the leafage extinguished:
Etna! ’tis amid you, visited by Venus
On your lava fields placing her candid feet,
When a sad stillness thunders wherein the flame dies.
I hold the queen!

O penalty sure
No, but the soul
Void of word and my body weighed down
Succumb in the end to midday’s proud silence:
No more, I must sleep, forgetting the outrage,
On the thirsty sand lying, and as I delight
Open my mouth to wine’s potent star!

Adieu, both! I shall see the shade you became.

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 9/30/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has been very busy helping our mom get adjusted to her new assisted living residence, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.

Left: Composer Claude Debussy

Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”), written in 1876, inspired Debussy, at about the time he turned 30, to conceive an orchestral work in three parts, to be designated respectively Prélude, Interlude and Paraphrase finale . A performance of such a triptych was announced for Brussels in March 1894, but it did not take place, for Debussy never got beyond the most rudimentary sketches for the second and third sections. He decided to abandon them altogether and revise the Prélude , extending it as a self-standing piece in which he felt the character of Mallarmé’s eclogue to be fully reflected. The word Prélude was retained as part of the title on the printed score, however ( Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune ): just as other composers had written concert overtures on various literary or pictorial themes, Debussy might have been looking ahead, in his use of this term, more than 15 years to his two books of Préludes for piano solo, comprising 24 brief pieces, each similarly self-contained and given a title indicating a descriptive or evocative character.

The Afternoon of a Faun (all the title the piece really needs) was in fact Debussy’s first significant work for orchestra, undertaken at more or less the same time as his first important ones for the stage (the opera Pelléas et Mélisande ) and in the realm of chamber music (the String Quartet in G minor). It was to have profound effects on the generation of composers that followed, farther-reaching than those produced by any single piece of French orchestral music up to that time. The impact of the premiere (Paris, December 22, 1894) was hardly less shattering than that of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had been nearly 30 years earlier. Debussy’s American biographer Oscar Thompson compared it with the Prelude to Lohengrin , in that “at the time it was written nothing like it existed in music.” Here was an entirely new kind of tone poem which, in Debussy’s words, “will no longer be professional rhetoric but will be given a more universal and essential psychic conception.” In its voluptuous harmonies and languorous, sinuous phrases “perfumes, colors, sounds correspond to one another.

Left: Stephane Mallarme by Renoir

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), was born in Paris into a family in which his father and grandfather had made a noteworthy career in the French civil service. He was expected to follow the family tradition but at school he did not do well except in languages. Mallarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Victor Hugo. At the age of nineteen he found Charles Baudelaire‘s The Flowers of Evil, which had appeared in 1857. Under its influence he wrote ‘Briese marine,’ starting with the much quoted line “Le chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres”. After leaving school he visited England and while in London he married Marie Gerhard. Mallarmé taught English from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon, and Paris until his retirement in 1893. His first poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s.

Mallarmé’s first important poem, ‘L’Azur’, was published when he was 24. All his life he spent a very long time on each of his poems, making them as perfect as possible. His best-known work is L’APRÉS-MIDI D’UN FAUNE (1865), which inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by the famous painter Manet. Debussy had set Mallarmé’s poem ‘Apparation’ to music in 1882, but their first meeting took place years later. From time to time Debussy attended Mallermé’s Tuesday evening gatherings, which attracted such writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as André Gide, Paul Valéry and Oscar Wilde, the painters Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler, and the sculptor Rodin. “Certainly Mallarmé prepared his conversations,” recalled Gide later, “but he spoke with such art and in a tone that had so little of the doctrinal about it that it seemed as if he had just that instant invented each new proposition”.

The Afternoon of the Faun presents the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. “Forgetful let me lie where summer’s drouth / Sifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth / Dream planet-struck by the grape’s round wine-red star. / Nymphs, I shall see the shade that now you are.” (trans. by Aldous Huxley) Mallarmé began to write the poems while working in Tournon, a town he found ugly and unpleasant. For Claude Debussy he wrote in December 1894 after coming from the concert: “… what a marvel! your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun – not in the slightest disaccord with my text, except that it goes further, truly, in nostalgia and light, so delicate, disquieting, and rich.”

Source: http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=2466
Source: http://www.enotes.com/afternoon-faun-salem/afternoon-faun-9650000010
Source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mallarme.htm

[mp3j track=”L_Apr_s-midi_d_un_faunet.mp3″]

Claude Debussy’s, “The Afternoon of a Faun”
Conducted by Leopold Stokowski
The London Symphony Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, London, 14 June 1972,
Based on the poem by Stephane Mallarme.

The tour starts here.

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