Marguerite Yourcenar

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Marguerite Yourcenar

Born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour
8 June 1903(1903-06-08)
Brussels, Belgium
Died 17 December 1987 (aged 84)
Mount Desert Island, Maine, USA
Occupation Author, essayist, poet
Nationality France
Citizenship United States
Notable work(s) Mémoires d'Hadrien
Notable award(s) Erasmus Prize (1983)
Domestic partner(s) Grace Frick (1903-1979)

Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a French and Belgian novelist. She was the first woman elected to the Académie française in 1980, and the seventeenth to occupy Seat 3.

[edit] Biography

Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels, Belgium to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French aristocratic descent, and a Belgian mother who died ten days after her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother.

Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. Her intimate companion at the time, a translator named Grace Frick, invited her to the United States, where she lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual and she and Frick became lovers in 1937, and would remain so until Frick's death in 1979.[1][2]

Marguerite Yourcenar translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937.

In 1951 she published, in France, the French-language novel Mémoires d'Hadrien, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim.

In this novel Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. This novel has become a modern classic, a standard against which fictional recreations of Antiquity are measured.

Yourcenar was elected as the first female member of the Académie française, in 1980. One of the respected writers in French language, she published many novels, essays, and poems, as well as three volumes of memoirs.

Yourcenar lived much of her life at Petite Plaisance in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Petite Plaisance is now a museum dedicated to her memory.

  • Her fight for animal rights was a very important element of her life : «Les animaux sont mes amis et je ne mange pas mes amis.» ( Animals are my friends and I do not eat my friends ). She also considered that " The fight for the protection of the Animal is the same than the fight for the protection of the Man " : «La protection de l'animal, c'est au fond le même combat que la protection de l'homme.» She has been a great inspiration to many intellectuals, artists, animal right activists such as Brigitte Bardot, Frédéric Back, ...

«Soyons subversifs. Révoltons-nous contre l'ignorance, l'indifférence, la cruauté, qui d'ailleurs ne s'exercent si souvent contre l'homme que parce qu'elles se sont fait la main sur les bêtes. Rappelons-nous, s'il faut toujours tout ramener à nous-mêmes, qu'il y aurait moins d'enfants martyrs s'il y avait moins d'animaux torturés, moins de wagons plombés amenant à la mort les victimes de quelconques dictatures, si nous n'avions pris l'habitude des fourgons où les bêtes agonisent sans nourriture et sans eau en attendant l'abattoir.»

[edit] Bibliography

  • Le jardin des chimères (1921)
  • Alexis ou le traité du vain combat (1929)
  • Alexis (translated by Walter Kaiser), ISBN 0-374-51906-4
  • La nouvelle Eurydice (1931)
  • Pindare (1932)
  • Denier du rêve (1934, revised 1958–59)
  • A Coin in Nine Hands (translated by Dori Katz), ISBN 0-552-99120-1
  • La mort conduit l'attelage (1934)
  • Feux (prose poem, 1936)
  • Fires (translated by Dori Katz), ISBN 0-374-51748-7
  • Nouvelles orientales (short stories, 1938)
  • Oriental Tales, ISBN 1-85290-018-0
  • Les songes et les sorts (1938)
  • Le coup de grâce (1939)
  • Coup de Grace (translated by Grace Frick), ISBN 0-374-51631-6
  • Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951)
  • Memoirs of Hadrian (translated by Grace Frick), ISBN 0-14-018194-6
  • Électre ou La chute des masques (1954)
  • Les charités d'Alcippe (1956)
  • Constantin Cavafy (1958)
  • Sous bénéfice d'inventaire (1962)
  • Dark Brain of Piranesi: and Other Essays (1984)
  • Fleuve profond, sombre rivière: les negros spirituals (1964)
  • L'Œuvre au noir (novel, 1968, Prix Femina 1968)
  • The Abyss, aka Zeno of Bruges (translated by Grace Frick - 1976)
  • Yes, Peut-être, Shaga (1969)
  • Théâtre, 1971
  • Souvenirs pieux (1974)
  • Dear Departed: A Memoir (translated by Maria Louise Ascher), ISBN 0-374-52367-3
  • Archives du Nord (1977)
  • How Many Years: A Memoir (translated by Maria Louise Ascher)
  • Le labyrinthe du monde (1974-84)
  • Mishima ou la vision du vide (essay, 1980)
  • Mishima: A Vision of the Void, ISBN 0-226-96532-5
  • Anna, soror... (1981)
  • Comme l'eau qui coule (1982)
  • Le temps, ce grand sculpteur (1984)
  • That Mighty Sculptor, Time (translated by Walter Kaiser), ISBN 0-85628-159-X
  • Quoi? L'Éternité (1988)

Other works available in English translation

(contains An Obscure Man, "A Lovely Morning" and Anna, Soror...)

  • With Open Eyes: Conversations With Matthieu Galey

[edit] References

  1. ^ Joan Acocella (14 February 2005). "Becoming the Emperor". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214crbo_books?currentPage=6. Retrieved 2009-01-08. 
  2. ^ "Marguerite Yourcenar". 2002-02-21. http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/bioy1/yource01.html. Retrieved 2009-10-15-05.