Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (June 13, 1912 - October 24, 1943) was a French Canadian poet and painter, who has been hailed as a precursor to Quebec's literary renaissance of the 1950's. He has been called "Quebec's first truly modern poet."

Life

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau was the grandson of the poet Alfred Garneau and great-grandson of the historian Francois-Xavier Garneau. He spent his early years at his family's manor in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Quebec, the town where his cousin Anne Hébert was born. He moved to Montréal with his parents in 1923. There, he studied the classics at three Jesuit colleges: Sainte-Marie, Jean de Brebeuf, and Loyola.

In 1925, Garneau studied painting at Montreal's Collège des beaux-arts under Paul-Emile Borduas, Jean Palardy, Marjorie Smith and Jean-Paul Lemieux. He won a bronze medal and second prize for a work of art. In 1934 he exhibited some paintings at the Galerie des Arts in Montreal and in 1937 he presented his painting "Sky Fall" at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Still in his youth, he founded the monthly journal La relève with his friends Paul Beaulieu, Robert Charbonneau, Robert Élie, and Jean Le Moyne.

In 1934, he developed a rheumatic heart problem and discontinued his studies. He then devoted his time to writing poems, painting and music. In 1937, Regards et jeux dans l'espace, his collection of poems, was published. At the time of his death in 1943, he was living with his parents in Quebec: he was canoeing alone and died of an apparent heart attack.

Poetry

Garneau wrote poetry prolifically between 1934 and 1937; on one day alone (October 22, 1937), he reportedly wrote 13 poems. In his lifetime, though, he published only one slim volume: The 28-poem Regards et jeux dans l'espace, which "deals with his rural childhood, nostalgically evoking a state of grace beyond recall.... The poet's spiritualized landscapes transpose suffering and intermittent ecstasy into images of overgrown pathways, distant birds in flight, or forest fires, or again a snowbound house with shuttered windows, a key symbol of confinement and flawed security."

"Radical in its form, with its unrhymed lines of various lengths, its lack of punctuation and its broken syntax, Saint-Denys Garneau's poetry was equally original in its themes (the spiritual adventure of the poet, the nature of artistic creation, the search for purity) and in its ironic distance."

After Garneau's death, his unpublished poems were collected by Élie, who published them in 1949 under the title "Les Solitudes" together with Regards as Poésies complètes: Regards et jeux dans l'espace, Les solitudes.

Garneau's 1935-39 diary was published in Montreal in 1954 under the title Journal, edited by Élie and Le Moyne and with a preface by Gilles Marcotte. Canadian poet John Glassco published his English translation, The Journal of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, in 1962.

Also in 1962, Canadian poet F.R. Scott translated ten of Garneau's poems into English for his book, Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hebert. Glassco published his translated Complete Poems of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau in 1975. Glassco's book won the Canada Council Award for translation that year.

Garneau's poetry has also been also translated into Spanish by Luis Vicente de Aguinaga, and was published in 2007 as Todos y cada uno.

Some of Garneau's poems have been set to music by Canadian contemporary classical composer Bruce Mather, and by Quebec folk group Villeray.

Awards

• Maison Henry Morgan (1926)
• Association des auteurs canadiens (1928)
• Canadian Authors Association (1929)

References

• Canadian Writers, an examination of archival manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, journals and notebooks at Library and Archives Canada

External links

• Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denis at the Canadian Encyclopedia.
• Poems of Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau