“Everything in our culture is contrast: we treasure the oppositions that coexist inside us.” Thus Emile Verhaeren in the 1890s, optimistically defining the extraordinary flowering of art, literature and architecture in fin de siècle Belgium. For all his originality, Emile Verhaeren was the product of his place and time: a country barely fifty years old in which the mix of Germanic Flemish and Latinate French created a generation of writers and artists of international significance. Verhaeren, along with his contemporaries Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, Albert Mockel, Charles van Lerberghe and Max Elskamp, helped to define the Symbolist movement.
We talk of ‘French’ Symbolism, and we are right, but only insofar as it happened in (and to) the French language. Symbolism was the first consciously ‘francophone’ literary movement, drawing to Paris and Brussels writers from places as diverse as Poland, Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Russia and Latin America. What they all had in common was a sense of what Mallarmé called “le double état de la parole” – “the double state of the word”. It’s a gnomic statement, but Mallarmé expands a little: “brut ou immediate ici, là essentiel” – “raw or immediate here; there essential”. For the Belgians, everything was in a double state – Belgium itself was a ‘double state’ – and Verhaeren and his contemporaries understood that what made them the perfect writers to define Symbolism as both a movement and an approach to poetic language was this consciousness of their own cultural duality.
Like Rodenbach and Maeterlinck, Verhaeren wrote in French, but allowed his Flemish heritage to infiltrate and infuse his poetry. We might say that he used Flemish to de-Latinize his French, which is colourful, rough, often unbridled and houleux, stormy. His poetry works at a mythical and symbolic level, shot through with surprising imagery and extended metaphors, but he is always true to the social realities of his time. Collections such as Les Villes tentaculaires and Les Campagnes hallucinées evoke, in dream-like, sometimes nightmarish, language the radical social and demographic changes of modernity: industrialization, rural depopulation, land-and city-scapes transformed for ever by work but also worklessness, by money, technology, mechanization and the machine-age. This explains in part why he remained such a popular poet among the Socialists and Communists of the twentieth century long after his more rarefied, solipsistic contemporaries had been forgotten.
Verhaeren is always a lyric poet, whether describing the architectural treasures of Flemish béguinages or the broken factory windows of an unnamed industrial city. He is proud of the rich impurity of his language, which is a world and a culture away from the transparent classical rationality of French. Verhaeren’s French is dynamic, instinctive, exclamatory, close to the intimate voice yet also vatic and prophetic. Unlike so many of his Symbolist contemporaries, he is unafraid of the future, and is no surprise that when the Futurists drew up their list of admired predecessors, Verhaeren is chief among them. But he was also a poet of the inner landscape, of the heart and mind, of suffering and isolation and self-torture. Verhaeren was by nature an optimist, especially in his last few books, but even his pessimism is alive and variegated, full of energy and vigour. In ‘The Crown’ he writes “Yes, I too would like my crown of thorns / and one for every thought, red hot, across / my brow, right into my brain, to the frail roots / where sins and forged dreams writhe / within me, through me”. Verhaeren, like Baudelaire, is adept at finding concrete ways of expressing abstract or numinous feelings; and like Baudelaire, he is especially fond of the jarring but memorable simile, the forcible yoking together, with a kind of tender violence, of like and the unlike into an image. We may see the continuation of his voice and vision not just in the work of the Futurists but also in the Expressionist poetry of Germany, where his work was read and admired well into the twentieth century, and into the work of the Surrealists, who learned from his audacious image-making how to satisfy the dual-pull of expressing the inner and the outer worlds.
Verhaeren seems to us, nearly a hundred years after his death, uniquely modern, yet at the same time carrying with him something unreconstructedly romantic: a sense of the poet as visionary, a belief that the poet can include the world and not simply refine it away or stun it with words, and that poetry itself has the appetite not just to observe Progress but to be part of it. These translations stay true to his spirit but also to the élan of his Flemish-inflected French, and carry him across into English admirably.
Patrick McGuinness