Planet Literature

The work of the French poet Robert de Souza (1864 – 1946) has been unjustly fallen into oblivion. This can be exemplified by his poem Le sommeil des cygnes (The Sleep of the Swans / Sleeping Swans). It is obviously inspired by symbolism, but has a meditative tone all of its own.

Robert de Souza is today one of the forgotten poets of the Fin de Siècle. Even the biographical data of his life are only incompletely documented. The little that we know results in the following picture:
The poet was born in Paris in 1864. There his father – whose family originally came from the Auvergne region, but had already emigrated to Portugal in the 17th century – worked as an attaché at the Portuguese legation. In 1891, de Souza married Jeanne Issaverdens, whose family of Armenian origin had moved from Constantinople to Marseille after the birth of their daughter.
With his wife, de Souza moved to the city of Nice in Southern France, where he worked intensively on urban development issues since the turn of the century. In a detailed study published in 1913 (Nice, capitale d’hiver – Nice, capital of winter), he critically examined the development of Nice since 1860. This part of his intellectual work is the one most received and appreciated to this day.
In the mid-1930s, de Souza moved back to Paris. In the last years of his life, he focused on philological and linguistic issues (including troubadour poetry). The invasion of Paris by the German Wehrmacht forced de Souza to flee to Brive-La-Gaillarde in 1940, where he became involved in the Résistance with his son and a circle of friends. He died in 1946, two years after his wife, with whom he had lived all his life.
De Souza’s symbolist poetry was written mainly in the 1890s. In 1923, he published a complete edition of his „poésies et poèmes“ (subtitle) under the title Modulations. Formally, de Souza’s poetry follows his ideal of a „vers libre“, i.e. a free-rhythmic (though not necessarily rhyme-less) verse.
This ideal he also theoretically substantiated in extensive studies in the 1890s. Furthermore, he edited an Almanach des poètes and published various essays on literary criticism.
All of this testifies to the fact that de Souza assumed a prominent position in the literary scene of his time. It is therefore all the more incomprehensible that his work has largely fallen into oblivion today.

Further information on the biography of de Souza (French): Cervera, Suzanne: Nice, capital d’hiver: Robert de Souza, poète, érudit et urbaniste précurseur. Recherches Régionales 2012, n° 201, S. 66 – 77.

Detailed essay on de Souza (German): Robert de Souzas Gedichtzyklus Du trouble au calme. Nachdichtung und Analyse; rotherbaron.com, March 2019

Poetic Adaptation: Sleeping Swans

White floats with furled sails,
that’s how the swans sleep in the reeds,
swayed by the lullaby of the wind
in the nacreous bay.

Silently gazing,
half-closed flower stars are shining
from the heavenly lake where the swans are at rest,
like newborns wrapped in their white fluff.
With their shivering shimmer
they gleam around the childlike contentment
and penetrate the rose nets
that the evening mist has thrown out.
And they watch over their innocence.

A wintry peace envelops all things,
unapproachable like a heart pure as snow,
whose touch makes you tremble inside.
The bluish haste of the day fades away
in the rosy pallor of the ripple’s writing,
in the lines that merge and intertwine
to a circle around the silver sleep of the swans.

The pure glimmer of their dreams
is guarded by the misty blanket of the night.
But – even purer than the flock of feathers –
the moon mother removes the mist
with her delicate fingers.
Luminously she, the immaculate one,
watches over the white calm of the cradles.

Bild /Image: Pexels: Sky (Pixabay)