Abstracts
Une voix protéiforme et polymorphe
Franca Bruera
André Salmon has explored manyfold forms of writing over the span of an extremely long career, extending from the turn of the century – he started as a poet in 1903 – up to the post-WW II years. Salmon’s oeuvre encompasses poetry and prose writing, reaches out to theatre, memoir and art criticism, while embracing journalism in general. His polyphonic work deserves its place in the context of international modernism, especially when reconsidered in the light of recent archival research and the discovery of new documents.

André Salmon face à Picasso, « Le premier artiste de son âge »

Peter Read

André Salmon and Pablo Picasso enjoyed a close relationship from 1905 onwards and Salmon’s poetry and prose offer exceptionally clear-sighted responses to Picasso’s work. Writing as an insider and eye-witness, Salmon provides vivid insights and key information on individual works, but also identifies and highlights significant turning points in the artist’s development. Picasso cold-shouldered Salmon from 1935 to 1951, because of his journalistic activities. Once reconciled, they saw each other regularly in Sanary-sur-Mer and a late Picasso drawing indicates his interest in La Terreur noire, Salmon’s 1959 history of anarchism.

« Halte-là la musique / par ici les chansons »

André Salmon sur les airs de son époque

Jacqueline Gojard and Alessandro Maras

This article has two parts. In the first, Jacqueline Gojard studies the privileged relationship between poetry and song in the life and work of André Salmon (1881-1969). In the second, Alessandro Maras analyses the relationship between this poet and art music. Although he lived in a time of great musical revolutions, Salmon seems to have had nothing to do with the world of Stravinsky and Debussy, thus confirming and making explicit the attitude of many artists and poets in the context of the aesthetic paradigm shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

« Le faux n’est révéré que pour l’amour du vrai »

Salmon et « Prikaz »

Alexander Dickow

This article argues that André Salmon’s Prikaz (1919) mounts a virulent critique of pre-World War I aestheticism through an obsessive return to the idea of falsity – false appearances, inauthenticity, the counterfeit, and related leitmotive. On the one hand, the poem proposes itself as “mere” play, a carnival that’s all for show; on the other, this representational “fake” concerns real horrors and atrocities. Although Salmon explicitly suggests that he reserves all judgment with regard to the Revolution, the poem seems to demand that the reader judge for her own sake whether historical atrocities are an acceptable object for a playful, poeticized representation. In the wake of the historical trauma of World War I, the Revolution, and the Spanish flu, this voluntary ambiguity seems to tempt the reader to decide one way or the other – and it proves difficult not to condemn the pre-war aestheticism Salmon stages.

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Un roman-conversation ?

Le « lyrisme ambiant » de « La Négresse du Sacré-Cœur »

Émilien Sermier

Long marginalized by literary history, André Salmon’s novels contributed to the modernist and international renewal of the genre at the turn of the century. This article examines the ‘simultaneist’ composition of La Négresse du Sacré-Cœur (1920). While this ‘urban novel’ makes Montmartre the main enunciative subject of the text, it also redeploys the procedures of the ‘poem-conversation’ – as defined by Apollinaire – on the scale of the nove

André Salmon journaliste

De la guerre d’Espagne à la libération

Marilena Pronesti

For years, several specialists have questioned the damnatio memoriae that has dogged the writer, poet and journalist, André Salmon, who, nevertheless, played an essential role in poetry and aesthetics, and was a considerable influence on the world of arts and letters during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this article, I propose a few different areas of research that help us trace the origin of this literary oblivion, which even today is difficult to understand. Tracking these clues, scattered over different sources—periodicals, books, or even court documents—I have reconstructed the contexts for the various reasons that André Salmon lost his rightful place (either large or small, time will tell) in the history of French letters. Thanks to the few but significant sentences written by Salmon in his memoirs, and above all, thanks to the courage of a small group of literary and art specialists on this common path, I have been able to find meaning in certain clues, strewn like pebbles in a fairytale, from the memories and commentaries dedicated to this author since the 1930s. It is an itinerary marked by a precise series of chronological steps that allow me today to better understand André Salmon the person and the strange fate of his literary career.

André Salmon à la confluence de la littérature et du journalisme

Du « lyrisme du quotidien » au poème-reportage

Maria Dario

This article aims to study the creative interferences between the newspaper, considered as an aesthetical model, a textual support and a media vehicle and André Salmon poetic work’s from Les Féeries (1907) to the after war poetical cycle (Prikaz, L’Age de l’Humanité, Peindre). After having sketched out the features of “lyrisme du quotidien” conceived in the first phase of his poetic work, I will focus more specifically on the great post-war epics, where Salmon develops a new poetic form, the “poem-reportage”, capable of expressing “le climat instable de l’inquiétude universelle”. The poème-reportage proposes a redefinition of poetry that, by accepting the risks of confrontation with the referential, gives it the means to reappropriate its function of privileged intermediary with the world.

Guillaume Apollinaire et André Salmon: deux poètes en correspondance

Au fil des lettres et des textes, 1903-1969

Jacqueline Gojard

This article, based on correspondence and various exchanges, tells the story of an undying friendship between two poet-brothers: Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. This story has indeed continued well beyond the death of Guillaume, November 9, 1918. This is evidenced by a posthumous dialogue with the lost friend, maintained by the author of Souvenirs sans fin, who died on March 12, 1969.

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Andre Salmon, Poet/Critic (1881-1969)

André Salmon Colloquium Papers Published Online in CoSMo

Abstracts

Une voix protéiforme et polymorphe

Franca Bruera