Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob

(Mayer André) Marcel Schwob (23 August 1867 – 26 February 1905) was a Jewish French writer.

Biography

He was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine on 23 August 1867. He was the brother of Maurice Schwob and uncle of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob).

In 1884 he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who became one of his models, and whom he translated into French.

He was a true symbolist, with a diverse and an innovatory style. His name stands beside Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau, André Gide, Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Jules Renard, Alfred Jarry, Édouard Dujardin in French Literature.

He is the author of six collections of short stories: Cœur double ("Double Heart", 1891), Le Roi au masque d’or ("The King in the Golden Mask", 1892), Mimes (1893), Le Livre de Monelle ("The Book of Monelle", 1894), La Croisade des Enfants ("The Children's Crusade", 1896), and Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary Lives", 1896).

Alfred Vallette, director of the leading young review, the Mercure de France, thought he was "one of the keenest minds of our time", in 1892. Téodor de Wyzewa in 1893, thought it would be tomorrow's taste in literature itself.

Paul Valéry dedicated two of his works to him - Introduction à la Méthode de Léonard de Vinci and the Soirée avec M. Teste. Alfred Jarry dedicated his Ubu Roi to Schwob. Oscar Wilde dedicated to him his long poem "The Sphinx" (1894) "in friendship and admiration." Jorge Luis Borges wrote that his book Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy, 1936) was inspired by Schwob's "Imaginary Lives."

Along with Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté, and Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage. Wilde struggled with his French, and the play was proofread and corrected by Marcel Schwob for its first performance, in Paris in 1896.

He studied Gothic grammar under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1893-4,^[1] and later earned a doctorate in classic philology and oriental languages. His work pictures the Greco-Latin culture and the most scandalous characteristics of the romantic period. His stories catch the macabre, sadistic and the terrifying aspects in human beings and life.

He became sick in 1894 with a chronic incurable intestinal disorder.^[2] He also suffered from recurring illnesses that were generally diagnosed as influenza or pneumonia and received intestinal surgery several times. In the last ten years of his life he seemed to have aged prematurely.^[3]

On 12 September 1900, in England, he married the actress Marguerite Moreno, whom he had met in 1895. Charles Whibley, the English writer, was a witness at the wedding.

His health was rapidly deteriorating, and in 1901 he travelled to Samoa, like his hero Stevenson, in search of a cure. On his return to Paris he lived the life of a recluse until his death in 1905. He died of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour.^[4]

Works

• Étude sur l’argot français ("Study of French slang", 1889)
• Cœur double ("Double Heart", 1891)
• Les jeux des Grecs et des Romains (translation of the monograph by Jean Paul Richter, 1891)
• Le Roi au masque d’or ("The king in the gold mask", 1892)
• Mimes (1893)
• Le Livre de Monelle ("The Book of Monelle", 1894)
• Lecture on the play Annabella et Giovanni by John Ford (1895)
• Moll Flanders (a translation of Daniel Defoe's novel, 1895)
• La croisade des enfants ("The Children's Crusade", 1896)
• Spicilège (1896)
• Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary Lives", 1896)
• La Légende de Serlon de Wilton ("The Legend of Serlo of Wilton", 1899. See also Linquo coax ranis)
• La tragique histoire de Hamlet (translation of the Shakespeare play, jointly with Eugène Morand, 1900)
• Francesca da Rimini (translation of the play by Francis Marion Crawford, 1902)
• La lampe de Psyché (1903)
• Mœurs des diurnales (under the pseudonym of Loyson-Bridet, 1903)
• Le Parnasse satyrique du XVe siècle ("The 15th century satirical poets", 1905)
• François Villon (1912)
• Chroniques (1981)
• Vie de Morphiel (1985) (Morphiel the Demiurge at "Cafe Irreal" translated by Michael Shreve)]
• Correspondance inédite (unpublished correspondence, 1985)
• Correspondance Schwob-Stevenson (1992)
• Dialogues d'Utopie (2001)
• Vers Samoa ("To Samoa", 2002)

Notes

Bibliography

• Sylvain Goudemare, Marcel Schwob ou les vies imaginaires. Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2000.
• Marcel Schwob, "The Book of Monelle", tr. Kit Schluter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wakefield Press, 2012.
• Gayle Zachmann, "Marcel Schwob's Archaeologies and Medievalism," in: [http://works.bepress.com/richard_utz/86/ Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin]], ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 48–50.

Site (in French)

• Site consacré à l'écrivain Marcel Schwob

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marcel Schwob.

• Marcel Schowb Correspondence with Mark Twain Shapell Manuscript Foundation
• Marcel Schwob at Brigham Young University (French)
• Marcel Schwob at Brigham Young University (English)
• Translation of Morphiel the Demiurge at "Cafe Irreal" (by Michael Shreve)