Les Amours jaunes

Les Amours jaunes ("The Yellow Loves," or "Wry Loves") is the sole poetry collection by Tristan Corbière (1845–1875). Published at the author's expense in 1873 by Glady frères, a Parisian publishing house, it encompasses nearly all of Corbière's verse output, 101 poems of diverse sizes and forms. The work's printing was paid for by the poet's father, to whom the collection is dedicated, and 490 copies were produced in total. Certain of these include a self-portrait etched by the author.^[1] Published two years before Corbière's death at age 29, the book passed without notice at the time.

After the poet's death, the poems of Les Amours jaunes went on to influence Verlaine's Parallèllement, the works of J.K. Huysmans, and probably Jules Laforgue. In later generations, André Breton and the Surrealists would claim to be his ardent disciples; Fargue, Superviellie, Céline and Prévert all received his influence. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound introduced his work to the English-speaking world.^[2]

The enigmatic title immediately establishes a dissonance which marks the entirety of the work. The terms it brings together proceed from an oxymoron which evokes Les Fleurs du mal: stamped with a scathing irony, the poems' expression of love lets out a sickly "rire jaune" (hollow, or forced laugh, literally "yellow laugh") with Baudelaireian resonances. Also informing the title may be the color yellow's traditional association with cuckoldry, the yellow wheel [rouelle] Jews were forced to wear in medieval France, and also the color's association with class betrayal ("yellow unions"). There is also the association with jaundice and yellow fever, and general ill health. In short, according to the annotated edition edited by Christine Aragon: "Color of treason, exclusion, sickness and death, yellow opposes itself to the pink of happiness and health, to the white of purity."^[2] The pluralization of "Amours" is a reminder of the multiplicity of love's aspects, and may be an allusion to the Amours of Ronsard.^[2]

In The Color of Yellow: or The Visual Politics of Late Modernity, Sabine Doran writes, after highlighting Baudelaire's use of the color in Les Sept Vieillards ("The Seven Old Men"): "Using black humor to attack the whole fabric of nineteenth century French poetry as well as his own status as a poet, Corbière transforms into “depoetized” moments of “prosaic understatement” Baudelaire’s attempts to capture fugitive moments emerging from evil and decay. The self-declared Tristan figure is suffused with a bitter-yellow atmosphere throughout; he sees his life as an “adulterous mixture”: each possibility is canceled out by its opposite—an “artless artist,” an “actor, who did not know his role.”^[3] She relates this aesthetic of futility to František Kupka's painting The Yellow Scale.

The collection is divided into seven sections:

• Ça
• Les Amours jaunes
• Sérénade des sérénades
• Raccrocs
• Armor
• Gens de mer
• Rondels pour après.

These sections are framed by two poems which echo La Fontaine's celebrated fable La Cigale et la Fourmi ("The Ant and the Grasshopper"). These are dedicated to the poet's only muse, Armida Josefina Cuchiani,^[4] whom Corbière calls Marcelle without obvious reason.

The final section, Rondels pour après, (Roundels for Afterwards) groups together six melancholy lullabies of a rare inspiration, such as this particularly striking piece:^[5]

Rondel

Il fait noir, enfant, voleur d'étincelles !
Il n'est plus de nuits, il n'est plus de jours ;
Dors... en attendant venir toutes celles
Qui disaient : Jamais ! Qui disaient : Toujours !

Entends-tu leurs pas ?... Ils ne sont pas lourds :
Oh ! les pieds légers ! - l'Amour a des ailes...
Il fait noir, enfant, voleur d'étincelles !
Entends-tu leurs voix ?... Les caveaux sont sourds.

Dors : il pèse peu, ton faix d'immortelles ;
Ils ne viendront pas, tes amis les ours,
Jeter leur pavé sur tes demoiselles...
Il fait noir, enfant, voleur d'étincelles !

Translation:

Roundel

It's dark, child, thief of sparks!
There are no more nights, there are no more days;
Sleep... awaiting the arrival of all those
Who said: Never! Who said: Always!

Do you hear their footfalls?... They aren't heavy:
Oh! the light feet! - Love has wings...
It's dark, child, thief of sparks!
Do you hear their voices?... The crypts are deaf.

Sleep: it weights little, your burden of immortelles;
They will not come, your friends the bears,
To throw their stones on your damselflies...
It's dark, child, thief of sparks!

Corbière plays with polysemy through the use of the word "demoiselle," which in French can designate both a tool for pounding cobblestones into place, or a dragonfly. In the La Fontaine fable L'Ours et l'Amateur des jardins, a bear accidentally crushes the head of his companion with a stone while trying to kill a fly on his nose.^[6]

J.K. Huysmans describes Corbière's poetry in his novel À rebours: "It was barely French. The author was talking pidgin, writing his poems as if they were telegrams, suppressing too many verbs, affecting a mocking tone, indulging in the gibes of a low bagman; then, all at once, out of this jumble would squirm curious conceits, dubious affectations, and then a cry of acute pain would start, like a violoncello string's breaking."^[7]

• Read online (In French)