Georges Rodenbach Belgium

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) was born in Tournai,Belgium but spent his early years in the Flemish city of Ghent and later lived in Paris, where, like his childhood friend and compatriot Emile Verhaeren, he rubbed shoulders with all the main players of the French symbolist movement. Rodenbach’s name is forever associated with Bruges, the location for his most celebrated and enduring work, the poetic novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892). He also wrote a number of collections of poetry of which Le Règne du Silence from 1891 in many ways prefigures Bruges-la-Morte. A further novel Le Carilloneur (1897) is also set in Bruges. Several books of short stories, prose poems, and a range of essays on such diverse figures as Rodin, Monet, Huysmans, Verlaine and Mallarmé attest to a prodigious literary talent.

Rodenbach was a typical writer of the decadent period, unfailingly anti-bourgeois, solitary, an aesthete suffering some undisclosed malady of the spirit, the victim of a palpable sense of ennui or ‘spleen’. But despite his intractable suspicion of modernity and its apparent inherent dangers to artistic integrity, his poetry, like that of Verhaeren, has relevance to our time – unlike many of his peers, whose work now seems enmeshed in the literary frivolities and indulgences of the period. It is no surprise that after his death Rodenbach’s precise, poignant, delicate yet existentially muscular poems attracted the likes of Rilke and Proust. These two exceptional diviners of the unacknowledged life secreted within objects and atmospheres saw in them a fellow explorer, a wholly authentic and uncompromising voice, that articulated an interior landscape of the soul like no other. It is this voice that Anglophone readers today can now access after decades of inexplicable neglect.

Rodenbach was the first Belgian writer of his circle to move to Paris, and find support from his French counterparts. He died there of ill health in 1898 aged 43.

(2017)